A touch of class
laboratory for trying out plants; it’s also an extremely beautiful space James Hitchmough’s small Sheffield garden serves as his own private
Professor James Hitchmough is a hard man to get hold of. Apologetic emails from South Africa, China, the Orkney Islands or Kyrgyzstan explained he was photographing plants in high-altitude meadows. When I finally meet him, Stan his dog upstages him, scattering pots of exotic cuttings before barging into the borders after a cat. None of this fazes the professor. “My tolerance for disorder,” he explains, “is very high.”
Disorder is a word he uses often. As Professor of Horticultural Ecology in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Sheffield University, he’s spent 20 years probing how much ‘naturalism’ (for this read ‘chaos’) people can tolerate. Scrutinising his environment is second-nature to him. He grew up in a pit village in Northumberland surrounded by spoil heaps. “I asked myself, why is this place so bloody awful and what would make it better?” It’s a question he’s spent a lifetime answering.
His own back garden behind his terraced house on one of Sheffield’s vertiginous hills is his outdoor laboratory. It was derelict when he bought it, meaning waist-high weeds needed to be cleared and remaining trees pruned to open up the shade canopy, and leave the remaining two-thirds open. The stylised meadow he has created unfolds from late winter onwards when bulbs and a low understory of woodland plants, such as primulas and ranunculus, reduces the area of bare soil that weeds would otherwise swiftly colonise, with taller summer plants emerging as the spring layer dies back. “Here I can examine how plants perform and use volumes of space as they grow, and from a design point of view it’s vital to be able to conceptualise this,” he says.
Summer plants, such as Berkheya purpurea, Kniphofia albomontana and Echinacea pallida, are selected mostly to have leafless stems so the borders have a certain wildness rather
than a neat en bloc structure. “I’ve done research into what stage people become hostile to disorder and regard it as ‘mess’. It’s much easier to change vegetation than it is to change people.”
During the 1980s, James spent a decade in Australia researching native grasslands, an experience he found profoundly liberating and through which he came to appreciate the unfamiliar drought-tolerant vegetation. “I became opposed with the idea in British gardening that you keep adding water and fertiliser to everything and it keeps getting better,” he says. “I like a more stripped-back approach, like Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden in Essex.”
The plants in his own garden are like stamps in his passport, numerous and exotic. For the past decade, however, South African species have been an abiding interest. Most of the species familiar to gardeners, such as agapanthus and kniphofia, come from eastern summer rainfall areas, but James has been researching plants from western winter rainfall areas, such as the Hex River and the Komsberg, which are much less common. “It gets down to minus eight, so many of these species, such as Bulbinella latifolia and Watsonia marlothii, grow really well in the UK.”
In the past, critics have argued that this ‘supercharged nature’ aspect of urban wildflower planting is an unnatural confection and difficult to achieve well. “Initially there wasn’t a warm reception to the idea of naturalistic vegetation, but now it’s become much more normalised, and things like the Olympic Park [where James and his Sheffield University colleague Professor Nigel Dunnett acted as planting design consultants] played a major part in that,” he says. “It’s having your cake and eating it, but what’s wrong with that?” USEFUL INFORMATION James Hitchmough’s new book Sowing Beauty: Designing Flowering Meadows from Seed (Timber Press, £25) is out now.