“The garden looks brilliant in winter!”
Mottisfont’s head gardener Jonny Norton shares his insights
Jonny is head gardener at Mottisfont, where there are eight full-time members of the gardening team and one apprentice. There are also almost 70 volunteers who help out in the gardens.
How long have you been at Mottisfont? I’ve been here nearly three years. I hadn’t previously worked for the National Trust, but I’ve been working in horticulture for more than 30 years, so this was a wonderful opportunity to come and use all that experience. The chance to work in the famous rose garden was too good to miss.
Are there any particular challenges here? We’re in a band just above the Isle of Wight, where we have to deal with relatively dry weather conditions.
Is the soil good? It’s a mixed bag. We have bands of clay and then there are chalky/flinty areas, which are typical for this area. We’ve also got some peaty, damp areas too. There’s a lot of water here – we’re surrounded by the River Test, so we’ve a real combination of soils and a range of different garden styles as a result.
Do you compost much? We produce huge amounts of compost – 150 tonnes was our target last year. We use this as a mulch throughout the gardens, where it aerates the soil as it breaks down. We also try to dig as little as possible. Healthy soil means healthy plants and consequently we choose not to spray our roses with either pesticides or fungicides, allowing for a balanced environment both above and below ground. In particular, the roses love the clay soil in our rose garden, which means they find it easier to fight off disease so we don’t need to spray them. We’ve invested in a new compost facility, where we have eight compartments. This allows us to make it in smaller quantities for more frequent use. We also collect leaves to make leafmould soil conditioner.
Any new projects this winter? We finished building an exciting new kitchen garden last year, but there’s more work going on there. We’ve been preparing the soil and will be planting that up for the first full season. The new kitchen garden will be a ‘must visit’ in autumn, when its 80m (262ft) hanging gourd looks its very best.
What do you love about Mottisfont right now? It’s a brilliant garden for winter – not just the area that’s dedicated to winter plants. We have some incredible trees, such as our amazing National Plant Collection of plane trees. We’ve got one of the tallest London planes in Europe. The bare-stem shrubs have quite exceptional shapes in winter. We also have masses of naturalised bulbs, starting in mid-January with a fantastic display of snowdrops. We planted 15-20,000 Galanthus nivalis a couple of autumns ago and there are snake’s-head fritillaries under an orchard of cherry trees, and chionodoxa en masse underneath our pollarded lime walk. The display of bulbs goes right through to late spring with a fabulous display of tulips in the rose garden.