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Ticks the box

Very occasionally something you have planned in your garden goes just right.
After a torrential storm yesterday afternoon I wandered out with the camera to find this Rosa omeiensis pteracantha (sorry, no polite way of saying that) doing precisely what it was planted there to do - glow blood red, translucently, in the low evening light.
How very satisfying.

George's back!

He couldn't stay away!
Our sadly missed former gardener George Watson has returned one day a week to help us whip the place into shape before the NGS Open Garden day on August 24th.
Though I know he doesn't like them, this picture of a verbascum is too good to miss out!

View from the site hut roof

We climbed onto the site hut next to our building site of a house to take this shot of the borders....

A different canvas

Sometimes being an artist is the best job in the world. Over the decade I have worked professionally I have been involved in many diverse contemporary projects, from installations to film and public art, and have met so many fascinating and resourceful people. I can't imagine what other career would have offered this scope.

Since starting the garden here at Lawson Park, my horticultural confidence and knowledge have really developed in ways I could never have anticipated. Opening the garden this year (Aug. 24th) feels like the preview of any other exhibition of my work!
In the last year or so I have really wanted to start integrating gardening into my art - not as 'sculpture in the garden' which I almost universally hate - but holistically, as a way of articulating my feelings about, well - everything.

I think there is something profound about a garden, something profound and utopian about people making gardens together, especially in public places (I see Lawson Park essentially as a public garden). In that way they connect at a deep level with the ambitions I have always had for my art works.

With that thought, myself and Nina Pope - with whom I have worked for over a decade - recently successfully bid for a commission to be lead artists on Abbey Gardens, a site near the Olympic Village in East London. The site cannot be 'developed' due to holding some ruins of a Cistercian Abbey there, and so it's earmarked as a new public garden with spaces for locals and commuters / visitors. A new Docklands Light railway station will be next door by 2010 and it has an active residents group who want to be hands-on - so it offers the most amazing potential.
The site's history - from 14th C to the WW2 Blitz - is inspiring. This image of the Plaistow Landgrabbers has given us the project's title "What will the harvest be?" - they were a group of unemployed men who squatted land nearby in 1906, and harvested crops until eviction. We want the garden to somehow combine the productivity of the medieval monks, the nearby allottments and the Landgrabbers - with the ambition and opulence of a real 'civic park'!

The project will be slow - probably at least two seasons until permanent planting, but thats fine. I am really keen to develop the ideas slowly with the local users, and the Council need to fundraise of course....
I'll post more as we grow the project - in the meantime see:

Our project website and blog on the Gardens
Friends of Abbey Gardens website

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Exmoor gardens

I absolutely loved a recent visit to Greencombe Garden near Porlock in Somerset, where I'm working on an art project. The late spring sunshine shone on the freshest green foliage, and the garden's famed woodland plantings were luminous against the mossy paths.

Soon after arriving I was lucky enough to meet the garden's creator and owner of 50 years, Joan Loraine. Now confined to a mobility scooter she remains closely involved, she was en route to finding more space for some more of the garden's fern collection. We discussed the mystery of pollination of erythroniums, and I met her American family helping out in the Garden.

BUT I do have an absolute horror for this kind of garden signage:

I know that with a serious collection such as this you DO need to offer accurate information to visitors but this totally overshadows those exquisite blooms!

The man from the National Garden Scheme says yes

We just got accepted for the NGS open garden scheme! We first offered ourselves up a few years ago, but were scuppered by the dodgy access issues and -ahem- lack of hard landscaping on the site, making it all a bit hazardous for the typical NGS mature visitor!
This time however, the building works are on track so we plan to open late August 2008.
Meanwhile we have planted - exploiting the sodden August weather - our bog at last with a yellow colour scheme throughout: Primula bulleyana, primula sikkemensis and the splendid yellow and purple veined iIris 'Holden Clough' with a few carex grasses and evergreen ferns intermingled.

Native niwaki

Though I've spent a fair amount of time in Japan in the last few years, I sadly didn't manage to meet any of the country's many highly skilled gardeners. 'Niwaki' by Jake Hobson (Timber Press) is thus a godsend for the gradual Japanification that is happening in the garden as much as in the kitchen here.
We have plans to place a Japanese Tea House in our meadow, and to form a bridge between it and the native plants all around I decided to prune some of the very characterful ancient hawthorn nearby in the 'Niwaki' style. Of course I forgot to take the 'Before' picture, but here is the 'After'. The process basically means pruning, tying down and staking trees to 'fake' a kind of premature aging, concentrating on encouraging horizontal growth, 'pads' of foliage, and opening up views into the bark and limbs of the specimen. With already ancient trees like this one, the process is a little easier and faster than it might be with, say, a new bonsai - which is more or less the same process but smaller.
No idea how these self-sown trees will take to this treatment, so watch this space for a 2008 report.