Editor’s letter
By now gardeners are itching to get into the garden – time spent planning and contemplating over winter can finally be put into action. April is a joyous month with its vibrant greens and fresh-faced flowers. Tulips are among those plants key to a spring garden and their continued appeal is evident in the gardens we feature this issue, in particular the tulip-filled garden of Polly Nicholson, a lover of rare breeder and broken tulips. Polly’s Wiltshire garden contains not one but three walled gardens and she has collaborated with designer Arne Maynard to transform these into a fabulous family garden that also serves as a base for her artisan flower-growing and floristry business.
For Dutch bulb breeder Jan Ligthard it is the variety in shape and colour that he loves about tulips and that spurs him on to breed new and unusual cultivars. It takes years to bring a new cultivar to market but that hardly seems to matter given the Netherlands’ long history with the bulb – it’s just part of the long and continuing heritage.
We take a look at our own gardening heritage too, celebrating the life of Rosemary Verey, who was born 100 years ago this year. She came to gardening in her forties and transformed the garden at Barnsley House in the Cotswolds into one of the most influential in the country. Along with her writing, she showed how basic principles of design and planting, borrowed from sometimes larger gardens and estates, could be made to work in a smaller, more intimate space.
From past heritage to urgent environmental issues. The shocking images of plastic-filled oceans on BBC One’s Blue Planet II have probably made many of us take a long, hard look at our use of plastic and try to find ways of reducing that use. In this issue gardener Alys Fowler looks at how as gardeners we can tackle the problem. The figures for contamination are sobering, so doing what we can really does matter. And that includes us as a magazine too. If you have your magazine delivered, you’ll know that it comes in a plastic bag. We realise that the use of single-use plastic is an issue and, along with other members of the magazine publishing industry, are actively looking for alternatives. Extensive work needs to be done to assess the validity of each option and to be certain that they will protect our magazines in the postal system.
We currently keep the weight of our mailing polythene as low as possible and have deliberately chosen a recyclable material. Unfortunately, most local authorities don’t currently provide kerbside collections for polythene, but it can be recycled at some supermarkets.
We hope to work to a better solution soon,