Garden of the Week
This beautiful four-acre garden reflects the owner’s naturalistic style, combining thousands of grasses and herbaceous perennials
rnamental grasses have undergone a massive revival in popularity in recent years – and rightly so. One of the people instrumental in this resurgence is Neil Lucas. He, and his Knoll Gardens nursery, is renowned throughout the world, and Neil is regarded as the ‘grass guru’.
But the four-acre garden at Knoll Gardens is also a revelation in its own right, showcasing Neil’s naturalistic style of planting and gardening, combining thousands of grasses and herbaceous perennials. Neil works with nature to create a beautiful year-round garden, as well as a flourishing environment for plants and a welcoming habitat for wildlife.
“Like any garden, it’s a place to grow the plants we like, but our ethos is that the garden can be a place for all,” Neil says. It’s also a living workshop and research laboratory for the nursery, testing new plant introductions and trialling plant combinations, as Neil puts his ‘right plant, right place’ principles into action, as well as somewhere to find out more about his planting style and the wildlife it attracts.
Although Neil has had the garden since January 1994, it actually started life in the late 1960s. “It had been through a period being run as a tourist attraction with lots of annual bedding areas. So while the basic framework of trees and shrubs were already present, we had a massive planting job to do,” Neil says. “It has evolved over a period of years, thanks to a lot of hard work and effort. Like any good garden, it tended to evolve as we went along – there was no ‘masterplan’ as such. If I were to compare it to a building, then it
has undergone a major refurbishment; the basic structure is still the same, but the detail is radically different!
“There are no distinct ‘rooms’ – areas tend to evolve their own character as the garden matures. We’ve quite a bit of shady planting and some more open areas. These contain our larger, naturalistic-style planting, such as the Decennium border – repeated, informal groups of grasses and perennials blend together – a Mediterranean-style gravel garden and the Dragon Garden with a meadow style and an almost prairie-like feel.”
Covering an extensive four
acres, Neil luckily doesn’t have to tend the garden all on his own. “We have a full-time gardener, Luke, who does a really great job. He has become very interested in our style of gardening.” There‘s also the Knoll Gardens Foundation, a charity whose main function is to promote the style of gardening to a wider audience. “The charity’s volunteer team is an invaluable help in the garden’s maintenance and when we work on new projects.”
But to prove you don’t need a huge garden to grow lots of grasses, scattered throughout are collections and groupings of grasses growing in pots, showing the huge value these plants can provide even on the smallest patio or other paved area.
But it’s not all about grasses and perennials, Knoll Gardens also features an impressive collection of rare and unusual trees and shrubs, which provide glorious autumn leaf colour at this time of year, as well as an impressive year-round backdrop for other plants. Tremendous trees include a superb Ginkgo biloba, eucalyptus, willow oak ( Quercus phellos) and silver maple ( Acer saccharinum). Other autumn colours are provided by fruit, berries and autumn leaf colours from numerous shrubs, including Euonymus alatus ‘Compactus’, Euonymus europaeus ‘Red Cascade’, Cornus florida, Photinia davidiana undulata ‘Fructu Luteo’, Pyracantha coccinea ‘Lalandei’. Oak-leaved hydrangeas ( Hydrangea quercifolia) bring light to shady summer spots with their large, white flowers, but their true worth is even more obvious in autumn as the leaves turn a lovely deep red.
“Although the garden is ‘quieter’ than during the summer, I love this time of year, especially when just a little sun shines through the plants. With the warm browns and golds of the grasses adding their honey-coloured hues, autumn is truly stunning in the garden. Once the winter cold descends, frost and ice quickly highlight the amazing structural shapes of
the grasses and perennials left to stand until they’re cut down and turned to mulch in the annual ‘spring chop’ at the start of the new gardening year.”
Neil particularly loves the following plant combinations in late autumn: l Molinia caerulea planted with verbena, growing through and backed by Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Rosea’. l Tall Molinia arundinacea coming out from an underplanting of symphyotrichum (aster) ‘Little Carlow’ (cordifolium hybrid) is a November highlight. l Evergreen Panicum virgatum ‘Northwind’, planted behind a drift of hylotelephium (sedum) ‘Matrona’.