Magic touch A plant-rich garden that completely envelops a small yet perfectly formed wooden house in rural Kent
Inspired by Great Dixter’s mixed borders, Andy Salter has conjured a dynamic garden full of surprise on a plot in Kent
Down a track deep in the Kentish countryside is the kind of landscape usually only encountered in literature. Sheep graze in the fields, kingfishers dart along the river where watercress grows and, sitting proud in a meadow, is a tiny, black-painted house. When Andy Salter first came here in 2014, it was a book that sprung to mind: Walden by Henry David Thoreau, about his quest for self-sufficiency while on a two-year sojourn in the 1840s in a cabin in the woods around Walden Pond in Massachusetts. “I read it when I was 15 and I’ve loved it ever since,” says Andy. “I’d take holidays to America and stay in huts in the middle of nowhere but it never seemed like something I could realistically achieve in life. And then here was this place.” Simple, wooden and with the potential to be surrounded by garden (at that time there was merely rough grass). It was perfect. The possibility of making a garden was important to Andy, a special-effects artist, who had also fallen hard for horticulture. A working holiday on a farm in Japan had led to a course at Hadlow College in Kent and then, inspired by a tutor who sang Christopher Lloyd’s praises, on to Great Dixter where Andy volunteered under head gardener Fergus Garrett, sometimes for as many as four days a week, for four years.
“I was very shy at first,” says Andy. “I was full of admiration for the gardeners and what they were conjuring. It felt like alchemy, and the polar opposite of my career.” But as time went on, he realised that the two were more closely linked than he had thought. “A good garden, an evocative garden, is often all about taking elements that don’t naturally co-exist and putting them together in a way that’s inspiring or pleasing and looks natural, which is what I’ve spent my whole life doing at work. Gardening takes this to a whole new level because you’re working with nature directly,” he says. “It’s a living composition; there’s something magical about it.”
This ‘magical, natural’ dynamic is what Andy set out to create in his own garden. Yew hedges, typical of
Great Dixter, were dismissed as they would have taken up too much ornamental space. Instead, Andy took his inspiration from the Long Border, with its artful mixed plantings of trees, shrubs, perennials, bulbs and annuals. “I wanted to get up every morning and be surprised,” he says. “There’s something about being disarmed that pulls you in, connects you with your surroundings and makes you more observant. It’s good for the psyche.”
An evocative garden is all about taking elements that don’t naturally co-exist and putting them together in a way that’s inspiring and looks natural
I wanted to get up every morning and be surprised. There’s something about being disarmed that pulls you in and makes you more observant
Plants, shapes and colours are repeated to make a coherent whole. The red of Rosa ‘Florence Mary Morse’ is echoed in ladybird poppies and, later, in Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’, and the domed heads of Angelica archangelica are mirrored in the Euphorbia characias subsp. wulfenii. Stands of Miscanthus sinensis var. condensatus ‘Cosmopolitan’, Digitalis and Thalictrum ‘Elin’ add vertical interest.
ANDY’S TIPS ON PLANTING INSPIRED BY GREAT DIXTER
• Use as wide a plant palette as possible – this is fundamental to the Dixter aesthetic. Evergreen trees, deciduous trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, annuals, bulbs – each type of plant brings a certain quality that contributes to the atmosphere in its own way.
• Don’t be too bitty. When planting a new garden – especially when it’s a smaller space – the tendency is often to be too cautious or delicate, and you can end up with something that feels like an allotment or a stockbed. Fergus would always encourage us to be bold.
• Be observant and discerning. If you decide you want Symphyotrichum ‘Little Carlow’, make sure that’s the one you buy and that you don’t just settle for whatever aster your local nursery happens to have in stock. Plants are not interchangeable.
• Don’t be lazy. If you have an idea, see it through.
Having dug the entire plot by hand – a feat that took three months at a point when the house still did not have a kitchen – Andy was left with a flat space ringed by a fence. He planted one of his favourite plants – the white-flowered Anemone x hybrida ‘Honorine Jobert’ – outside the front door and used that as a starting point, choosing its neighbours for their contrasting characteristics just as Fergus had taught him. Among others, he chose Aconitum ‘Spark’s Variety’ for its deep-purple colour, Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Rosea’ for its spiky habit and Allium cristophii for its earlier flowering season. It was, he says, “about the most fun I’ve ever had”.
In the border to the rear of the house – one long, uninterrupted run – structure was paramount, and so Andy planted trees and shrubs including Sambucus nigra f. porphyrophylla Black Tower (= ‘Eiffel 1’), Ilex x altaclerensis ‘Golden King’, Pinus sylvestris ‘Aurea’, Cedrus atlantica ‘Glauca Pendula’ and various roses, before placing other plants around them. Andy likes herbaceous perennials that are “good both in leaf and after they die back”, citing Calamagrostis brachytricha, baptisias, bronze fennel and cardoons among his favourites. Bulbs including snowdrops, winter aconites and alliums (‘Gladiator’, ‘Ambassador’, A. hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ and A. cristophii) nestle among them and September-sown annuals – ladybird poppies, Echium vulgare and cornflowers – add to the throng come early summer.
Maintaining a garden like this takes time. Thanks to his flexible working schedule, Andy estimates that, as the growing season picks up, he spends around 40 hours a week on various tasks. “It’s a luxury to have all these plants outside my front door,” he says. “I want to be out there working with them. Here, I feel connected to my environment in a way I never have in the city.”
Just as Thoreau discovered that the city offers plenty of distractions but that these aren’t necessarily the things we need to nourish us, so Andy believes that in making this garden he has become a new person. “I still can’t believe this is where I live,” he says.
Turn the page for 12 key plants from Andy’s garden
It’s such a luxury to have all these plants outside my front door. I want to be out there working with them. I feel connected to my environment in a way I never have in the city