NATURAL BY DESIGN
With great swathes of beautiful plants. Dove Cottage Nursery is a horticultural triumph
With swathes of plants, Dove Cottage Nursery is a horticultural triumph
behind a green oak gate in a high yew hedge at Dove Cottage Nursery near Halifax in West Yorkshire lies another world. On a terraced north-facing hillside, paths wind between densely planted beds of grasses and herbaceous perennials woven into moving pictures of shimmering, kaleidoscopic beauty, ruffled by the breeze and animated by buzzing bees and the chatter of birds.
Kim and Stephen Rogers had looked for a walled garden with level ground for their nursery when they returned north after four years in Surrey where Stephen worked as propagator at the Savill Garden in Windsor. Unable to find one, they ended up with a steeply sloping rutted field that had been Stephen’s parents’ smallholding, and, after a lot of hard graft, opened to the public at Easter in 1996.
“In the early days, we grew lots of pretty little spring-flowering woodlanders,” Kim recalls. “But when we visited Hadspen House and Bury Court in 1999, everything changed.” Kim, in particular, was bowled over by Sandra and Nori Pope’s use of single-colour gradations in the renowned walled garden at Hadspen House in Somerset: “When we got back, I experimented with grading colour by planting a border with white at one end and plum red at the other. It taught me how to relate plants to each other by looking at leaf and stem colour as well as flowers. Their book, Colour by Design, was my bible for a time.”
At Bury Court in Hampshire, designed by Piet Oudolf in collaboration with owner John Coke, the deschampsia meadow made the strongest impression on the couple. “The way the little dark purple alliums came up through the grasses blew our minds and we saw so many plants we’d never seen before. It was a real revelation to us,” Kim says.
Back home in Halifax, Kim and Stephen immersed themselves in the plants and philosophy of the New Perennials movement, which puts the emphasis on form and structure, using a carefully
selected palette of plants. They visited its chief exponent Piet Oudolf ’s own garden at Hummelo in the Netherlands a few years later. Over time, their garden changed as they removed trees and shrubs, and the bamboos they felt were too exotic for their setting, replacing them with carefully chosen grasses such as foxy-plumed Calamagrostis brachytricha, glittering Stipa gigantea ‘Gold Fontaene’ and dark, arching Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Black Arrows’, but never losing their joy in the colour and detail of flowers.
Kim and Stephen’s garden is now a complex three-dimensional tapestry, where low-growing plants such as creeping purple Acaena inermis ‘Purpurea’ and dwarf Calamintha nepeta subsp. nepeta ‘Blue Cloud’ are as valued as the tall sky-scraping prairie plants, including branching, purple-flowered Verbena macdougalii ‘Lavender Spires’ and towering Dipsacus pilosus, the small flowered teasel. In between, contrasting flower shapes create subtle rhythms through the garden, interspersed with light reflective grasses that move and whisper in the slightest breeze. Spheres, spires, flat-topped umbels, star-like daisies and thistles, including a spectacular river of Eryngium bourgatii ‘Picos Blue’, all play their parts. By winter, the flowers have become tawny, frost-catching seed heads that are left standing until March to provide food for birds and habitat for overwintering invertebrates. Tall see-through plants grow at the front of borders, filtering views of the wider garden and the landscape beyond. “We welcome plants that self seed because they move around and change the garden naturally over time,” Kim says. “My favourite is probably a little verbascum, V. blattaria f. albiflorum, that spreads beautiful floaty white flowers about.”
With three young children and a business to run, Kim and Stephen also needed a garden that would largely look after itself: “Tough perennials that get cut back once a year appealed to us because we wanted something self-sustaining and natural that didn’t require much intervention.” Nothing in the garden gets deadheaded, nothing is sprayed or collared with slug pellets and nothing is staked: “We like the way plants fall into each other, the way Rudbeckia laciniata lollops over and you get a horizontal stem cutting across verticals. It allows light into the centre of the clump, too, which encourages more growth.”
In the end, the steep site with its thin layer of topsoil has worked to the advantage of the plants that Kim and Stephen grow, many of which come from much hotter, drier climates. Water drains away down the slope and low fertility encourages slow, stocky growth less prone to wind damage.
Yearly trips to Dutch nurseries keep the garden and nursery fresh. A recent introduction was Kim’s absolute favourite plant, Actaea ‘Queen of Sheba’. “In the garden, we have its glistening black stems coming up through Molinia ‘Poul Petersen’. The buds are like pearls when they first appear and the scent when the flowers open is just gorgeous,” she says. Kim and Stephen’s love affair with plants is obviously not over yet.
Dove Cottage Nursery and Garden, Halifax, West Yorkshire, is open until 30 September, 10am-5pm, Wed-sun and bank holidays (01422 203553; dovecottagenursery.co.uk).