“We don’t feed, weed, stake or water”

Head Gardener Paul Smith reveals the quirks of Scampston’s perennial garden

Paul has been Head Gardener at Scampston for just over nine years. In his team are one other full-time gardener, a part-time gardener, casual staff over the summer and about 10 volunteers. The team looks after the four-acre walled garden and another nine acres of more traditional countryhouse-style gardens around the hall.

How did you come to work at Scampston? I was previously working as Head Gardener at Walmer Castle in Kent, but I wanted to come back to East Yorkshire where I was brought up. I’ve always been interested in ornamental herbaceous gardening, and I’d followed Piet Oudolf and Noel Kingsbury’s work from the late 1980s.

How do you keep the garden looking gorgeous in August? The key with Piet’s design here is that it’s not just about colour, it’s also about shape and form. When design students come to take photographs of the plantings we tell them to convert the images to black and white. If you take out the colour, you can see the shapes and structures of plants much more clearly. The planting season is also slightly different here. Compared to a traditional herbaceous garden it’s a little late to get going, but the season is actually longer. So, rather than having short bursts of colour followed by a lull and fading in September, the garden at Scampston is coming into its own in August and September. And we don’t deadhead anything. We keep all the seedheads intact as they provide shape and form through autumn and into winter.

How does Scampston differ from other gardens in which you’ve worked? With a traditional herbaceous garden there are huge demands on staff at particular times of year, with massive peaks and troughs, whereas here we’re steadily busy throughout the year. We don’t do any feeding because we want tough, strong plants. This also means we don’t need to stake anything. And even though we’re on sandy, dry soil, we don’t irrigate because the selection of plants was carefully chosen at the beginning to ensure they’d be happy in this growing environment. Rather than cutting down different plants individually in autumn and spring we cut everything down at the same time in late winter.

What jobs are you doing in August? Once all the plants have knitted together we don’t need to do any weeding and, because we’re not deadheading and watering, that frees us up to tackle other jobs. Scampston is quite a structural garden because there’s lots of hedging and topiary box and yew, so this is when we do the hedge trimming and shaping the topiary.

You have quite a bit of box at Scampston. Do you have blight? Over the past couple of years there have been signs of it in places. Our approach is to identify the box we most want to keep – in our case the box squares in the long borders, because they’re so integral to Piet’s design. Then we’ll apply a foliar feed to strengthen the plants and use a fungicide, and hopefully the plants will become resistant. If box in other parts of the garden becomes infected we’ll have to see it as an opportunity to try something new.

Is Piet still involved in the garden? He’s semi-retired now, but if we needed to make any major changes we would refer back to him. It’s one of his earliest gardens, so it’s an important part of garden history. We don’t want to fiddle with things or change too much.