FREE INSIDE MONTY DON
Extracts from his updated masterpiece
The Dry Garden was made in early 2004 from a yard in front of old stables we had used to store building material over the previous decade. It had a Tarmac covering, which I unpeeled with a shovel to reveal a solid bed of stone.
This is the old red sandstone that lies under the garden and is soft and, critically, very porous. Water flows through it and roots work their way down into it with surprising ease. We excavated 5-7cm of the stone – which was hard pick-and-shovel work – and added literally just a few inches of topsoil mixed with garden compost. The result was two beds flanking a curving path that were sheltered, sunny all day long and with a maximum depth of 10cm of soil before reaching the bedrock.
I confess that I seriously doubted if anything would grow at all as the net effect was rather like raising plants in a shallow stone trough. I need not have worried.
From the first, not only the conventional dry-loving plants such as Mediterranean herbs, and sedums and bearded irises (both right), loved it, but miscanthus, cardoons, cistus, foxtail lilies and even roses flourished. Since then it has been one of the garden’s least demanding areas.
The one part of the garden where we can grow bearded irises well is the Dry Garden and, for a few glorious weeks at the end of May they are the richest, most voluptuous flowers in the entire garden.
Lavender mostly struggles with our high rainfall, even when grown in pots made up with exceptionally gritty compost, yet is carefree and completely at home in the Dry Garden. In the Jewel Garden, sedums flopped in the over-rich soil, whereas on the poor fare of the Dry Garden they are half the size but upright, hardy and very, very happy.
Everything grows tough in this spot and the combination of the necessary robustness and the extra-good drainage means that there is not a hint of trouble from any so-called pests or diseases.
In 15 years we have never watered, never mulched, never fed. We encourage self-seeding and we like the tapestry veering towards jumble that inevitably follows this laissez-faire approach.
The contrast to the rest of the garden, with its rich, fat soil and overwhelming lushness, is so strong and so unexpected that it has expanded the range of the garden far beyond its actual layout. And there is the excitement of realising that, despite climate change and the baking heat and the lack of soil and the way that almost every rule is being broken, if you select the right plant for the right place, you can make lovely gardens almost everywhere.
2. THE PARADISE GARDEN
The Paradise Garden was made in 2018 after I had spent much of the previous year visiting Islamic gardens around the world for a television series. After such a complete immersion in the various styles of Islamic gardens, I wanted to make something that would be a memento of what had been a profoundly enlightening experience.
Islamic paradise gardens were created primarily as places of shelter from the burning sun and as sources of the most precious commodity of all – water. But here, the western fringes of Britain, in Herefordshire, we are long on rain and lush green but short on arid desert, so the garden had to be adapted to the realities of our climate.
The paradise-garden idiom dictated lots of fragrance as well as colour, and that the plants should be based primarily on fruits. In Islamic gardens the four fruits – dates, oranges, figs and pomegranates – were essential. Dates were not a viable option in Herefordshire but the other three grow well in pots. It had to have a building of sorts as a pleasant shelter (left) and I seriously considered making a rill as they feature strongly throughout the world of Islam, but the budget stymied that (the Paradise
Garden was made on a shoestring, costing about as much as the sandwich budget for the average Chelsea Flower
Show garden). In its place we have a very simple bubbling fountain set in a metal bowl – originally a fire bowl but with a hole drilled through it and a copper pipe passing down into a concrete tank below. The water feature is as much about sound as sight. It creates a continuous gentle murmur as the water bubbles up and spills over the edge of the bowl, to be recycled back down and up again from the cistern below.