Down in the shrubbery
Shrubs are the backbone of most gardens, but their everyday usefulness has made them easy to overlook. Val Bourne talks to Peter Catt, who has bred and grown some of the finest shrubs, about celebrating their variety and beauty
Val Bourne talks to Peter Catt, king of the stalwart shrub
THE name Peter Catt might not trip off the average gardeners’ tongue, but, in the horticultural world, he is highly revered. He’s one of 63 recipients of the Victoria Medal of Honour (shortened to VMH, the highest accolade given by the RHS), has been chair of the Woody Plant Committee and continues to serve on countless woody trials. His familyowned Liss Forest Nursery, Hampshire, supplies well-grown, quality woody plants to all the RHS gardens and the very best garden centres. In short, you’ve almost certainly planted something he’s grown.
Peter, a sprightly 82 year old, has been growing shrubs man and boy. ‘They provide a background and add structure and, without them, a garden is merely a flat affair,’ he explains. ‘Evergreens provide solid blocks of colour, whether variegated, red, or green.’
He is responsible for raising several forms of the hugely popular evergreen Choisya ternata, also known as Mexican orange blossom. These include the classic yellowleaved Sundance, which does a brilliant job lighting up shadier areas, and he recently raised and named Greenfingers, an allgreen choisya with smaller rosettes of neater foliage. It made its debut in Kate Gould’s
Shrubs provide a background. Without them, a garden is merely a flat affair
Greenfingers Garden at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show and this intricate, compact foliage plant will also earn royalties for the charity. Scented Gem, a fragrant compact choisya, and Gold Star will soon follow.
As a teenager, Peter helped on his father’s nursery and he recalls visiting the Woking area of Surrey to buy a basic range of deciduous shrubs that included forsythia, philadelphus and deutzia. ‘Any that didn’t sell, my father planted up.’
He went on to manage a nursery before joining the world-famous Sunningdale Nursery in 1959, dubbed the home of rare plants. The late Fred Whitsey (1909–2009) described Sunningdale as the most beautiful nursery in the country and the horticultural elite flocked to this Berkshire treasury.
Peter worked under Graham Stuart Thomas (1909–2003), propagating shrubs, together with Judy Medhurst, who is still propagating for him today and remains a great friend. Sunningdale introduced him to many more plants and extended his knowledge further. ‘We used to try to catch Mr Thomas out, so we’d find something really obscure and ask him what it was. He invariably knew the answer. I was in my early twenties and it was good fun. In later years, he would phone up and ask us both to come for coffee. We knew there was an ulterior motive: he wanted us to prune his mahonias for him.’
Thomas’s personal favourite was Mahonia x media Underway, with its tufts of paleprimrose flowers. Many people prefer Winter Sun, although Peter recommends Lionel Fortescue (see box). These architectural, shade-loving evergreens (named forms of the hybrid M. x media) produce scented flowers in November—surely the dreariest month of all. Peter grows and sells a hardy form of M. oiwakensis subsp. lomariifolia, the ash-like prickly foliage of which can have up to 30 pairs of individual, holly-like leaves.
Sunningdale propagated lots of shrubs, including the Wilson 50 collection of Japanese Azaleas, collected by Ernest ‘Chinese’ Wilson in Kurume in 1918 (‘They’re back—and hotter than a pyroclastic flow’, March 27). Peter honed his propagating skills, learning to saddle-graft rhododendrons and
Peter learnt to saddle-graft rhododendrons and Japanese azaleas by practising in his lunch breaks
Japanese azaleas by practising in his lunch breaks. He confesses to having ‘a love for acid-soil plants that dates from those days’.
At Sunningdale, he met the late John Bond, who became keeper of the Savill and Valley Gardens at Windsor in 1970: ‘They used to sell off surplus material they had propagated in the Walled Garden,’ he recalls. It was John who suggested Peter should be invited to judge the Woody Trials held at RHS Wisley.
Peter set up two nursery sites at Liss and nearby Greatham in 1971 and 1976, respectively. He erected his first greenhouse in 1976 and, now, the Greatham site has two or three acres of grass filled with specimens. Although he hasn’t noticed a decline in the popularity of shrubs, he is concerned that the range is gradually being narrowed because the garden-centre buyers and gardening public aren’t as knowledgeable as they were. Eye appeal drives sales now and some of the best plants don’t sit well in pots.
Skilful propagators are also in short supply. ‘It takes a lifetime to learn these skills,’ says Judy. ‘You have to feel the material with your fingers, so you can’t wear gloves, and some plants only have a three-week window of opportunity.’ Hardest of all to propagate are daphnes, although this is now mostly done via micro-propagation (growing plant material in flasks of growing medium). ‘There are more plants being bred in France, Holland and America,’ she adds, ‘so we’ve got a wider variety than we’ve ever had.’ This has brought many improvements. ‘Newer magnolias, for instance, are far more compact and flower when younger.’
Peter would love more people to plant indigoferas, summer-flowering plants that produce racemes of pink pea flowers. These mix well with summer-flowering perennials and many thrive among summer perennials on the sun-baked terraces of Kiftsgate Court in Gloucestershire.
Indigofera howelli is a medium-sized hardy shrub, with fingers of bright-pink flowers. Peter named Crimson Cascade, a chance seedling found in a friend’s garden, and this large indigofera has pendent crimson-pink flowers. It is one of Dan Pearson’s ‘must-have shrubs’, although it’s still tricky to source.
Peter has also raised several caryopteris, commonly called bluebeards. This laterflowering shrub usually has deep-blue flowers in September. When he spotted pink and white caryopteris in a Japanese plant catalogue, he sent for some seeds. However, the resulting plants proved to be lanky, with weedy-looking, stinging-nettle foliage.
Peter allowed the bees to cross these with C. x clandonensis, a sturdy hybrid raised from seeds collected by Arthur Simmonds, a gardener who worked in Clandon in Surrey in about 1930. After selecting the best seedlings and back-crossing these, he produced a superb new fragrant pink-flowered form that flowers from July to September, which he named Stephi, after his granddaughter.