The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
How a corner of Georgian Bath became US territory
Perched above the Avon Valley, the American Museum shows off the US take on perennials, says Tim Richardson
Amajor new destination garden opens today at the American Museum in Bath. The £2million New American Garden has been in gestation for a number of years, while managing to remain rather off the radar of the gardens world.
It turns out that this is a substantial piece of work across two-and-a-half acres, which represents an important chapter in the evolution of planting design in this country. The work of leading American firm Oehme, van Sweden and Associates (OvS), it introduces a British audience to a simpler, more muscular approach to naturalistic planting that has been developing across the pond over the past 40 years.
The museum is housed in an attractive four-square Regency-period mansion in honey-coloured stone, perched on the lip of the heavily wooded Avon Valley a few miles east of Bath. The interior has been set up as a museum of period rooms since the Fifties and its director is hoping that the garden will bring a new audience to an attraction that is all too often overlooked. One suspects he is correct in this judgment, since the new garden is certainly worth a visit in its own right. (Garden-only tickets are available.)
Eric Groft, OvS’s lead designer, has designed the garden to envelop the house on its eastern and southern sides, where the land falls away steeply towards the valley. “We borrowed the fluid lines of the landscape,” he explains, gesturing across the valley. “A year ago, you couldn’t see that view.”
A winding walk – inspired by the one made by Thomas Jefferson at his garden at Monticello – takes the visitor on a meandering route around luxuriant planting beds which frame fine views and back up to the house. “Without creating ‘rooms’ we tried to create defined areas in the garden,” says Groft. On the way around, the visitor comes across a small, grassy amphitheatre pocketed into the design, to be used for plays and concerts, and the garden has been given its own dedicated entrance, via two “Chinese” kiosks designed in homage to 18th-century garden follies. A rose garden featuring 36 varieties is located just below the entrance area.
But the main attraction is the perennial planting design. Near the house, the colour scheme is bold and dark, with plenty of Salvia pratensis ‘Indigo’, Echinacea pallida, Agastache ‘Blue Fortune’ and viburnums, lit up by ‘Annabelle’ hydrangeas, delicate white gauras, large Persicaria polymorpha and striking yellow Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’, bolstered by small clumps of grasses such as Pennisetum orientale
‘Karley Rose’, and Miscanthus sinensis ‘Yakushima Dwarf ’.
As one moves farther into the garden, the planting becomes simpler and wilder in tone, with large groups of Hydrangea quercifolia, agapanthus, senecio, heuchera, sedum, monarda and Eryngium yuccifolium. One curiosity is a clump of the prickly pear native to the US, Opuntia humifusa, which Groft admits is an experiment in this climate. A few new trees have been put in to break up the wide view – notably four tulip trees (Liriodendron) – but overall the emphasis is on the perennials. It means that the garden will be “quiet” in the months up to July, bulb plantings notwithstanding.
The garden provides a counterpoint to more familiar, European versions of the naturalistic style as developed by practitioners such as Piet Oudolf, Cassian Schmidt and our own James Hitchmough and Nigel Dunnett.
These differences can be seen to striking effect if one compares this garden with Oudolf Field, a large-scale planting at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in Bruton, Somerset, which is less than an hour’s drive away. It’s fascinating to see how the styles have developed on both sides of the Atlantic, despite the fact they can be traced back to the same root: naturalistic planting design in post-war Holland and Germany.
The OvS style is much simpler and more muscular than the European version, with single-species drifts and blocks of perennial flowers and grasses forming striking tableaux. There is a welcome emphasis on landscape design: the paths here have been carefully designed and engineered to create rhythm and flow. European designers like to use a constantly evolving palette of plants, which they now tend to mingle in order to evoke the idea of “plant communities”, whereas OvS uses a pared-down number of often quite familiar plants – partly because of the harsher conditions in much of the USA.
As ever with gardening, there are always surprises – even for the experts. Upon seeing the garden for the first time in several months, Groft exclaims: “I had no idea it would all be blooming at the same time! This takes my breath away. In the US there is a very clear succession of planting – but here, it’s all out. I’ve never seen these plants blooming together. Now I understand why you’re all so good at making gardens here…”
American Museum, Claverton, Bath BA2 7BD (americanmuseum.org).