Roger Phillips - The 3,000 Mile Garden

Eccleston Square,
London

6 September, 1989

Dear Leslie,

I loved your articles in the New York Times. You arent a garden writer, youre a poet! I have been thinking about you and your garden and then my mind jumps to what must be done in my own garden: planting, pruning, trimming, manuring or just the plain digging up and chucking out.

It was terrific chatting to you up in New Hampshire at the mushroom bash. Our conversation just got started and then suddenly it was so late at night that it just got ended, there are lots of other things I wanted to say but never got round to. I would like to hear what you are up to and thought you might like to hear what I am doing in the Eccleston Square garden. So here are a few more things I wanted to say to you but now I am going to have to paper speak.

This year the weather in England has been like Egypt: dry, dry, dry and hot, hot, hot. Watering has been the top priority. I got back from New England to find that the very day I had left for a month in the States, 31 July, the water authority had imposed a hose-pipe ban which has now lasted over a month and, as we have had no rain at all for the last three weeks, it looks as if it will be November before we get the hoses out again.

Let me give you some idea of our garden. It is about three acres, a typical London square, fenced and locked with what Thomas Cubitt, the architect, reffered to as Good iron railings in a letter to the then landowner, the Duke of Westminster, when asking to take a lease on the land to build the square as from Lady Day 1828.

We have no records of the date the first trees were planted but 1 have always supposed that the laying out of the garden would have been con-current with building the first houses which means 1832 or so. In those days there was only one tree that would grow in the thick, polluted London air: the trees that we call London plane and you call sycamore Platanus x hispanicus. (Now the Latin name has changed to Platanus acerifolia these things are sent to try us.) The first plan I can find of the square shows thirty-six trees and the beds, lawns and paths laid out just as they are now. Being an historic area the basic layout of the garden is protected by statute and cannot be interfered with. I dont find this a limitation but an inspiration: it concentrates my mind on the plants and structures, and forces me to find cunning ways to enhance what is already there. To me a garden should be full of surprises and secrets, areas where you can wander, wonder and generally lose yourself; there should be scents and colours to excite, shapes and textures to stimulate you.

The garden is run by the residents of the square and we each pay a garden rate. At the moment it is 65 per year. The residents elect a committee of twelve to do all the work. I was elected to the committee eight years ago and at the first meeting I attended someone mentioned that I had written books on plants, so they immediately asked me to take over the planting and care of the garden. What they didnt realize was that all my books were on wild flowers and wild plants. 1 loved the thought of doing it and so did not enlighten them. The garden at that time had just staggered on for years not totally neglected but lacking any loving care. The soil, on examination turned out to be dry dust that could not even be watered; water ran off in globules as it does from a ducks back. We were living in a London desert. Large areas had been used for dumping old leaves, bricks, rubble, cans, bottles, wood, glass, wire in fact the detritus of the whole period since the beginning of the Second World War.

Two gigantic problems needed to be dealt with before planting could be considered: clearing up the rubbish and improving the soil.

I have a theory that bankers, insurance men, stockbrokers and the like are underneath it all frustrated athletes or weightlifters. I put this to the test by planning a series of Sunday digs. What was really needed was a bulldozer and earth-moving equipment but what I had to hand was city gents. I was right. They all wanted to sweat and ruin their clothes and get generally filthy, moving the fifty or so tons of accumulated rubbish. Under one heap we found all the Tarmac that had been lifted from an ancient tennis court!

In the first area cleared with their sweat, I planted a fern garden with a tiny path through the middle. The main ferns are Matteuccia struthiopteris, the Shuttlecock Fern, which spreads like mad and Osmundia regalls, the Royal Fern. I found a clump of Royal Fern in the New Forest in southern England that was about thirty feet across and seven feet high. My clump is only about six feet across and no more than three feet high at present, despite the fact that we dug out a pit and lined it with plastic to hold the water around it it thrives in bogs. The ferns do not come into their own until about June so I lined the path with snowdrops and all the surrounds with Dicentra eximia supported by a few specimens of Dicentra spectabilis, the real Bleeding Heart, to arch over them. On another corner of this bed I have planted a massive clump of blue comfrey, Symphytum caucasicum, overshadowed by an ivy-covered holly. It flowers very early in March when it is only about ten inches high and keeps on flowering until it is about three feet high two months later.

On my travels looking for mushrooms in Washington State, two of the wild plants I saw there stuck in my mind. One was the little Pick-a-Back plant Tolmiea menziesii, that grows its new plants from the middle of its leaves hence its name; and the other was Aralia spinosa, the Devils Walking Stick. The first was easy to get: it is commonly grown as a house plant in England. Anyway I got one and in a few weeks I had propagated about fifty more by just putting mature leaves in pots with a tiny pinch of soil to hold them down. As far as the Aralia went, I decided in the end to go for Aralia elata Tariegata, a lovely form of the Japanese angelica tree. Now its gigantic leaves with their multiple leaflets arch gently above the ferns, adding to the already rather dense shade.

At one end of the path I have two camellias, Apollo and Yours Truly, both of which do well. The Apollo is very free flowering, the Yours Truly has fewer flowers but is well worth having as they are a lovely veined pink with a narrow pure white edge. At the other end of the bed, cutting the whole thing off from the rest of the garden, is a gigantic clump of Rosa Canary Bird, so charming with its rows of tiny, single yellow flowers. There are also some delicate polygonum fighting their way up through the ferns. We have two species, P. bistorta `Superbum for spring and the tall, red P. amplexicale for autumn. My other surprise plant for autumn is a disaster this year because of the lack of water. It is Ligularia hodgsonii. It has super great big leaves with purple backs and stems and then spires of orange-yellow daisy flowers in August. That is, in the past it had, this year it is a sad, lonely, drooping creature.

I nearly forgot. In the early spring there are two other things. A bank of Greek anemones, Anemone blanda, both white and blue. They carry on from the snowdrops, seeming to leap from the earth and then flower overnight the way an Amanita mushroom expands almost before your eyes in the summer woods. The second thing is a small clump of Uvularia grandiflora, the delicate relative of Solomons Seal. To me, on this side of the Atlantic, it is rather rare and special, but as its an American plant, you probably think of it as a weed.

Back to today. I have bulbs to order from my wholesaler. I am planting a little, round bed in the middle of the garden for next spring at present it is full of cosmos and sunflowers, surrounded by the common pink sedum. I am ordering: 1000 Narcissi Thalia, the orchid-flower narcissi, which will produce two to four flowers per head in early to mid April; 250 Greenland tulips; and 250 spring green tulips these two from the Viridiflora group, their green flowers edged with cream or old rose, will, I hope, make a subtle but fascinating combination. They should flower right after the narcissi, or so I hope. I am also ordering 1000 Scilla bifalia which arc going to be planted in the grass amongst a little grove of the Himalayan birch, Betula jacquemontii. The scillas were at the request of an Old Etonian on the committee with a rather overhearing manner. Hes called Oliver Baxter, a ball organizer by profession (balls as in dances), and when he isnt organizing he plagues me with some new plan or theory for the garden. Not that I mind, it keeps me on my toes. There is a super planting of scillas in Windsor Great Park near the Savill Garden. The Savill is one of the great gardens of southern England, with the most exciting collection of woodland plants I have ever seen. I have been making regular visits there to study the collection of rhododendrons it includes many of the original plants collected by Forrest and other great plant collectors. Anyway, I digress. The reason I give the quantities of the bulbs is that the total cost amounts to only 187.50. At todays exchange rate that is $288. Although its a lot of money it doesnt seem too bad for 2500 bulbs!