Rhythm of life
The private garden of designer Nigel Dunnett is brimming with a harmonious and joyful mix of naturalistic and biodiverse planting
There’s an alchemy to the perfect song, it speaks universally of the human condition, it validates an experience you couldn’t quite put into words and gives you a chorus to hum along to. It is repetitious, harmonic and stays with you. And that, according to planting designer Nigel Dunnett, is often his inspiration for making a garden. “A good song,” he says, “is multi-layered, which encapsulates what a good garden should be; a perfectly fitted together emotional ride.”
There are hundreds of thousands of photographs that are testament to the idea that a garden can be as catchy and hit-making as a pop song. Just search online for images the public have posted of the Olympic Park to see how infectious and joyous Nigel Dunnett’s work can be. People love it and that for Nigel is what it is all about. “I believe that for most people there is an inbuilt desire that is fundamental to ourselves about natural environment,” he says. “When you give someone a heightened naturalistic garden, the pull is deep inside our evolutionary selves. I think making gardens has the potential to be one of the highest forms of art because there’s a deep emotional level to what it does to us, to our wellbeing.”
He has mastered the public space, but what of his private world, his own garden? Well there aren’t many who would choose a north-facing former quarry cut into a valley so that there is very little flat ground, with a thin soil that is barely covering the rocky sandstone below, but Nigel says that the abandoned nature of the plot had him immediately. “It had been abandoned for 150 years and so had become quite wooded and it reminded me of my childhood woodlands. It’s a tough, hostile site, but it allows certain freedoms.”
Nigel and his wife, Marta had always gardened in small urban spaces and longed for something bigger. The acre or so came at a very good price, perhaps because most people don’t long for a quarry and the space would give plenty to experiment with. “It was a romantic backdrop to a bluebell wood, so for the first year we just lived with it, seeing what was there. We moved in autumn and could see there were lots of nice native flowers, but also a lot of weedy sycamore woodland that was very dense towards the house.”
The first job was to thin out the sycamore and leave the oak trees and this left Nigel with a lot of logs, which inspired an original idea. “I had all these logs and thought to use them to make retaining walls, I began by making very formal, low straight walls of logs, but I had this brainwave one day to make them into waves that repeated across the garden,” he says. The idea came in part from the dry-stone walls of the Peak District that surrounds the garden. “The walls are in a state of collapse and they wave up and down slopes of the hills rather than following the contours creating these endless wave patterns.” And so the leitmotif of his garden was born.
“I am away a lot, so the garden has to look after itself,” says Nigel, explaining that the planting needs to be robust and self-reliant. “I don’t mind making full use of common plants as well as the less well-known ones,” he says. “It’s part practical, I want plants that will look after themselves and be widely available.” Although he admits he has long had a weakness for annuals. “I have a long obsession with annuals that goes back to my teenage years. It was the magic of creating new life that really got me,” he says.
Certain species, such as Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii, are used as accent plants, acting like a chorus in the pop song, scattered across the site to give a pace to the garden. “The flowers look good in late winter through to early summer and it leads the eye across the garden. Then, as the year develops, others overtake around it.” He also uses anchor plants, characterful plants, such as coppiced black leaf elder, Sambucus nigra to pull the design together. “I’m a huge fan of the mixed border,” says Nigel. “I read Christopher Lloyd obsessively as a teenager and there’s a long tradition with the likes of Gertrude Jekyll and Vita Sackville-West of using painterly colours in the garden. In some ways my approach has been to update this tradition of colour and mixed plantings of shrubs, perennial and annuals but in a more sustainable and ecological way.”
The result is that perfect song, a garden that soars with its own rhythm, rises and falls with colour and texture and repeats the best sections over and over again – the whole thing sings. “There’s been a tendency with ecological design to focus on the science and technicalities and lose sight of the emotion of the process,” he says. “Pleasure is seen as not a very serious thing. But for people gardens are about that emotional response.” His own garden is a good as testament to this as one can get.
USEFUL INFORMATION
Nigel’s book Naturalistic Planting Design is out now, published by Filbert Press, priced £ 35. Readers who subscribe to Gardens Illustrated this month will receive a copy of the book. See page 32 for details.
Log piles
Partly inspired by the Peak District’s dry-stone walls, the log piles are made up of stacked sections about 20-30cm long, with larger logs at the base so that the piles build into a curve. “They are an incredible insect habitat,” says Nigel. “Because of that we get birds endlessly in and out collecting moss for nests or feeding and resting.” Many of the plants, such as the Ammi majus ( 1), Allium sphaerocephalum ( 2) and the self-seeding foxglove, Digitalis purpurea ( 3), have colonised themselves into gaps. The logs need to be replaced as they rot down after a while, but this means that there’s an incredible fungal fruiting every autumn as toadstools appear, giving the garden a whole new dimension.
Repeating themes
Several plants have been used throughout the garden to add a rhythm to the planting. In particular the accent plant Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii ( 1) has been scattered across the site to give a pace to the garden, while plants with dark foliage, such as Hylotelephium ‘José Aubergine’ ( 2) act as anchor plants to pull the design together, and add a counterpoint to the cool blues of Nepeta racemosa ( 3). At the centre of this group bleeding heart, Lamprocapnos spectabilis ‘Alba’ ( 4), is a perfect plant for this style of naturalistic planting, because after its spring flowering, its foliage fades to a beautiful yellow before disappearing so that the next layer can come up. Throughout the garden Nigel has Campanula lactiflora ‘Loddon Anna’ ( 5) for its almost flouncy lilac blooms, along with Alchemilla mollis ( 6), which he uses almost like water, allowing it to tumble like a waterfall down the slope. Its yellow flowers contrast nicely with the colours of the annuals, such as the orange-red Arctotis x hybrida ‘Orange Prince’ ( 7), the white Arctotis fastuosa var. alba ‘Zulu Prince’ ( 8) and the blue cornflower Centaurea cyanus ( 9).
Coppiced garden The woodland feel to Nigel’s garden is inspired by the Kent countryside of his childhood where he would regularly roam among the ancient hedgerows and local coppiced woodland. “It was a great privilege to grow up in such an environment,” he says. “One I wish every child could have. I remember being about 16 or 17 and understanding that the way I felt about beautiful, flower-rich, natural landscapes was something I never felt about a pristine garden.” That spontaneous feel here is created using Stipa calamagrostis ( 1), which floats above the log piles with Nepeta grandiflora ‘Dawn to Dusk’ ( 2) and delicate, lilac flowers of the Scabiosa columbaria ( 3).
Rain garden
At the front of the house Nigel has created a rain garden to absorb the runoff from the house roof, which is diverted from the downpipes into the garden. Planting here is slightly more formal than at the back and is in narrower, 60cmwide beds. “These are fairly narrow beds and I wanted to create a sense of multiple layers, so I’ve chosen plants that are very upright and don’t make a lot of shade, which allows for the next layer to grow up successionally between them.” Among the plants that can cope with wet conditions are Miscanthus x giganteus ( 1), which is left standing in winter for structure, Ligularia ‘The Rocket’ ( 2), Leucanthemum vulgare ( 3) and Astilbe chinensis var. taquetii ‘Purpurlanze’ ( 4).
Accent grasses
For Nigel naturalistic planting is less about trying to recreate planting combinations from the wild and more about combining the forms, colours and textures of plants in ways they might arrange themselves naturally. In his own garden the emphasis is on flowering plants, but he does use a few delicate and graceful grasses. “Grasses are important,” he says, “but I treat them as accent rather than in a scattered way in a matrix.” Here the delicate sedge Carex pendula ( 1) sits alongside the carmine pink spires of the willow herb, Chamaenerion angustifolium ( 2), and the upright feather grass Calamagrostis x acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’ ( 3), which comes into its own in winter.
Using non natives
Nigel has always mixed native and non-native plants in naturalistic combinations, believing the idea of prioritising natives is more of a philosophical debate rather than a scientific necessity in gardens. The key thing is to promote a high diversity of plants, and a layering of the planting to give it structure. “I want to create gardens that are diverse and enrich us and wildlife,” says Nigel. Every year he raises tender annuals, many from South Africa, in a small greenhouse to add to the scheme. “They bring a vitality and freshness throughout the year,” he says. In this sunny spot Scabious columbaria ( 1) is combined with the South African, Cape daisy, Arctotis fastuosa var. alba ‘Zulu Prince’ ( 2) .