A stylish ‘shop window’
When you see a plant you love in this tasteful, Continental-style, West Yorkshire garden and nursery, you can probably buy it too!
Dove Cottage Nursery, owned and run by husband and wife team Kim and Stephen Rogers, is among the very best nurseries in the country and it has been a place of pilgrimage for keen gardeners for many a year. Their display garden,
open on certain days between June and September, is their shop window and their naturalistic planting style is highly admired and bang on trend. When you’ve seen it, you can often buy it, too! The nursery and garden sit high above a wide valley close to Halifax and Kim and Stephen have their roots in this area. Stephen, whose family were butchers in Halifax, decided that working six and a half days a week wasn’t conducive to family life and he re-trained in horticulture at York’s Askham Bryan College as a mature student.
A fter a spell with the local council, the family moved down to the Savill Garden on the Windsor Estate and Stephen learned to propagate there. However, when their third child arrived, the couple began to hanker after Yorkshire, because the county runs through them like letters through peppermint rock. “We were leading two lives,” Kim says. “We were driving
home every six weeks to see our parents and they were missing out on their grandchildren.” A decision was made to move back and Stephen did garden maintenance locally, while Kim looked after the family.
The idea of running a nursery came out of the blue. “We were having a glass of wine with some friends and they suggested starting a nursery,” Kim explains. “We’d already been inspired by visits to Arley Hall, Cheshire, and Hadspen House, Somerset, which had colour-themed borders.” They’d also visited John Coke’s Bury Court Garden in Hampshire, which has atmospheric borders designed by Piet Oudolf.
The choice shrubs and bamboos, a legacy of Stephen’s time at the Savill Garden, were replaced by perennials and grasses arranged in colourful, thoughtful borders that reflect the Continental style. When visitors open the sturdy wooden gate leading to the garden, they have a real surprise.
It hasn’t been easy. “Everything had to be barrowed in order to improve the soil,” says Kim. “We didn’t import any
soil because it can introduce pernicious weeds like mare’s tail and ground elder. But we added a lot of stone chippings.”
A ll the paths meander around the garden because heavy rain once washed all the gravel down from the central path they used to have. All those curves and bends mean that visitors see more. “There are no buildings and no bones,” Kim adds. “But there are plenty of seats and we garden naturally, so there’s always a buzz of life over the flowers.”
Grasses play a key part and they unify the planting and add constant movement as well as texture. One of Kim’s favourites, acquired from Beth Chatto many years ago, is an unusual, pinker form of the annual barley-like grass Hordeum
jubatum. “It’s a deeper colour and it flowers four weeks earlier,” Kim explains. “It’s one of the things we allow to seed around.”
T here are lots of different molinias too, because this purple moor grass is native to the Pennines and thrives in high rainfall areas. “We grow taller ones, such as the much-admired ‘Windspiel’, and we really like the much shorter ‘Heidebraut’ because the dark, pointed leaves stay erect. Calamagrostis
brachytricha ‘Mona’, collected in Holland, has a more open feather that’s pinker and the new shoots are very dark in spring,” Kim enthuses.
Perhaps the most admired grass though is Stipa gigantea ‘Gold Fontaene’ because it looks like a golden shower when the sun shines through it.
“We try to avoid planting anything that takes the eye and we’ve taken out all our white phloxes for instance, because they dominated the planting. We go for blends, and shape is just as important as colour.”
With 500 different perennials on the nursery there’s plenty of choice. Favourite perennials include sanguisorbas and Kim prefers the ones with small, bobbly flowers. ‘Red Buttons’, a shorter sanguisorba that flowers for a long time, is a Dove Cottage introduction. They also admire one called ‘Stand Up Comedian’, a taller, white sanguisorba with red stems and glossy, green foliage.
Veronicastrum, another favourite, adds a vertical presence and ‘Lavendelturm’ forms good seed heads. ‘Erica’, a pale pink with dark stems, is another star plant, along with many deep blue perennial salvias.