Live from Lawson Park Garden

Ticks the box

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 17:04:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:50:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 15:03:00 +0000

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

A different canvas

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Fri, 16 May 2008 17:27:00 +0000

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

,

Exmoor gardens

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:02:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 11:18:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:54:00 +0000

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.

The Red Hedge

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:26:00 +0000

Like all DIY, a good hedge is all in the preparation.
In the dead of winter, January 2005, Adam dug a magnificent trench snaking across a hilly area to the east of Lawson Park's farmhouse, backfilling it with well rotted manure and breaking up the soil. It was about 2 feet deep, no mean feat in the this area of no topsoil. We planted, we mulched, we clipped (a lot, new hedges need almost brutal clipping in the first few years if you want a good, solid shape).
Now, just three years later we have this - 2 metre high in places - to look upon: we call it the Red Hedge because into the native mix of guelder rose, hazel, holly, blackthorn etc there are a few roses for summer colour and autumn hips - here is pictured my favourite in the foreground - Rosa moyesii geranium - the picture doesnt do its warm cerise blooms justice - it always reminds me of my friend Nina who loves this colour so much she's getting married in it this summer.

T-t-t-talking 'bout my inspiration....

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:36:00 +0000

A couple of weeks ago I walked up to Ruskin's Seat on the neighbouring Brantwood Estate at 9pm at night and cast a really analytical eye on the landscape. I have some new garden areas to plant up soon, and they are in what I term the Woodland Garden, so I am keen to keep it low-key and inspired by the surrounding landscape. The evening light was exquisite, the grasses and bilberries and mosses all distinct in shape still but woven into a dense low canopy. Each plant colony had a dense hub and then a broad, spreading mass of smaller satellite groups. The pale grass stems were highlighted against the dark moss, and the blueberry hummocks almost share the formality of box at this time of the year. The only colour was the beginnings of the bell heather in sparse rocky places. The few trees / shrubs - junipers and hollies up here are wizened and sculpted, multi-stemmed specimens.
Look and learn, I thought.

Advice on preventing your coldframe from taking off in the wind

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:26:00 +0000

Don't anyone ever say this blog isn't instructive.

Here are some pix of me and George's invention for tethering our two new coldrames to the hillside. Cunning, eh? If you too have the misfortune of gardening in an area of periodic cyclones, this could help you:
Wire, bungy ropes and a wooden length fixed to the ground the length of the frame - then just throw the ropes over the frame lids whether they're open or shut, fixing to the wires at either side.

Fluffy I want you*

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 21:14:00 +0000

Fluffy is how I'd describe most of our garden at present: New bronze fennel, thalictrum's powder puff heads, geranium cushions, forget-me-nots.

* A track by alt jazz act Polar Bear, and also an older one by some soul legend whose name I forgot

Can it get any greener

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:41:00 +0000

Here are a few pictures of how we're shaping up this year.
The first is a general overview of the main ornamental borders nearest the house. We recently overhauled these as the herbaceous planting was overgrown and also in recent years the boggy back border had dried out as I improved the soil, so plants like gunneras were actually getting a but limp in summer.
So this year its a little more slimline, with a wider path thanks to George, and some new plants like eremurus (an experiment in this windy wet place...) but generally a reduced pallette, as this is what i'm trying to do throughout to give the garden more coherence. The back hedgerow is now lush and dense after just 5 years, and gives us much needed shelter from the regular mountain-bikers on the track.

The second is really just showing off - I'm finding the new raised bed kitchen garden utterly compelling. Its like being a child again, looking after these squares of geometric little vegetable rows. These broadbeans were sown in the tunnel mid-Feb. and doing really well outside now.

The third image is the woodland garden, so-called despite there being no mature trees yet. We started to mow round existing hummocks of native grasses and heather and what's evolving is a really unusual space. Again I'm trying to reduce the plant palette, use repeated groups and keep it generally colour-free.

Out and about

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 11:21:00 +0000

An interesting away day was had by myself and some local ladies recently, at Acorn Bank near Penrith on the Northern Fruit Group's Apple Grafting Workshop. I enjoyed watching the elderly working with sharp knives and a devil-may-care attitude (see picture) as they showed us young 'uns the joys of creating apple trees from sticks, wax and plastic ribbons. My creation - 'Ashmeads Kernel' on M25 (thats a rootstock number not a motorway) - is recovering in the polytunnel.

One of my formative gardening memories is the successful raising of a 'Golden Delicious' (misnomer if ever I heard one) seedling from a pip in my back garden, a tree which was still there some 15 years later when the house was sold, and though I have as yet no orchard here, I long for this most fundamental of horticultural delights. I now have the technology, if not the space, to populate it with the rare and quirky of the apple world, forms selected by the fantastically perverse Northern Fruit Group, a club dedicated to growing fruit where it doesn't want to be grown, saving rare and wild weather-proof varieties for future generations, who better bloody well be grateful, what with the number of sliced thumbs this grafting must be causing.

A second trip was to the northern french town of Hesdin, where my partner's mother's garden had spent last summer turning into Sleeping Beauty's Forest, with added ground elder. We spend 5 long, 'dur', days labouring against every perennial weed known to man and wrestling some very energetic roses into submission. The French neighbours' curtains twitched as Adam flailed behind their shared walls, swearing prolifically as another thorn wedged itself into his head, and the local garden centre offered us shares in the company due to the quantity of mulch we bought.

Speaking of which, what gerden centres! Baby chicks, rat traps, log splitters, small agricultural machinery - these meccas put ours to shame, though bizarrely the only mulch you can buy baged up is large bark chips from maritime pines, rather municipal in appearance by probably very long lasting. We used them over a long border of membrane which I wrestled under the brutal roses in a desperate attempt to control the weeds.

Kitchen garden emerging...

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 22:42:00 +0000

...from the bracken!

Though it's taken so-o-o-o much longer than we expected to create, we are dead proud of this new experimental garden made on a shoestring - the Lawson Park Kitchen Garden. Its a southwest facing sloped site, some 50m x80m in size, that's around a quarter of an acre I guess.
The raised timber beds are mostly 4m x 4m (except of the large fruit bed), we would have liked them smaller for access but were stopped by the volume of materials we'd have needed. Paths are a generous 1.5 m wide, meaning great access, and finished in ungraded slate chippings, free locally.

Here's what I'll be trialling in the site this year, so far just celeriac, lettuce, broadbeans and tomatoes are sown in the unheated polytunnel:

Broad bean ‘ Green Windsor’

Celeriac ‘Prinz’

Dwarf french bean ‘ Purple Queen’

Runner bean ‘Czar’

Shungiku Chop Suey greens

Tomato Adine Cornue (in tunnel)

Parsley ‘Italian Giant’

Beetroot ‘Barabietola di Chioggia’

Leaf beet ‘Oriole’

Chinese cabbage ‘Nikko F1’

Broccoli Purple Sprouting Early

Cabbage ‘Vertus’

Corn salad ‘Louviers’

Squash ‘Blue Kuri’

Salsify ‘Mammoth’

Kale Dwarf green Curled

Courgette Partenon F1

Scorzonera

Leek ‘Bandit’

Cucumber ‘Marketmore’ (in tunnel)

Lettuce ‘Lattughino’

Lettuce ‘Rubens Red Cos’

Potatoes Red Duke Of York, Premiere, Maris Bard, Epicure and Orla

Onion ‘Purplette’

Red Orach

MORE SOON!

Bracken fiend

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 22:26:00 +0000

Each weekend is now being spent finishing the planting of a new mixed hedge(row) round the new kitchen garden which is around 60m x 40m in size. Up here we have to disregard the textbooks and plant regardless of the effects of the last few months of rain (or we'd never plant anything) meaning trenches like the Somme and a lot of sliding around and swearing into the mud as the mountain bikers fly past us on Sunday afternoons.
The site of the front of the hedge is exposed, full of rock, and very steep - this due to a paper miscalculation meaning that the raised bed grid of the garden took up rather too much room and pushed the perimeter forward. So to cap off the misery of planting into this we need to assemble some kind of narrow path to facilitate the occasional trim alongside it. The quantity of bracken in this area has led us to not only hand dig its tough black roots out, but also make the decision to plant the hedging into woven landscaping mulch fabric. The woven stuff frays very easily and I don't like working with it as much as the other softer unwoven kind, but I'm told its better. Cutting and fitting round the twiggy plants is slow and tedious work, and of course the whole lot needs a bark or gravel mulch to finish - but in the long run the hedge will get away faster and provide the much needed windbreak the vegetable beds need.
The hedge is trenches with wellrotted manure and the plant mix FYI is based on the most vigorous plants in the two very successful hedges so far planted here - one in 2001, now 6' high and one in 2005, now 4' high. Its around 40% hazel with the rest made up of beech, holly, swedish whitebeam, sloe, guelder rose, cherry plum and amelenchier ovalis (this last for the plain reason I managed to grow dozens from seed) with the odd fuchsia for glamour.
As with the rest of the garden we pray the deer have tastier hors d'oeuvres elsewhere as there's no fencing....

Emerald in the gloom

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 19:09:00 +0000

Gardening as I do in some wet mountains, I was particularly appreciative of Kylemore Abbey in Connemara (Ireland) which I recently visited. Now a school and nun community, the recently restored 6 acre walled kitchen garden is awe-inspiring both in and outside its walls. The scale is vast, built originally by some nuts Victorian gentry who only occasionally visited, and it included dozens of glasshouses for wet weather walking, pineapple beds and lots of now-restored island beds of gaudy bedding. All framed by the most romantically gloomy mountains.

Have a look at www.kylemoreabbey.com/garden.asp for more...

Helping hands

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:35:00 +0000

A long overdue online welcome to George Watson, a former head gardener who has been working for us part-time since early summer. Left pretty much alone during the driest season for eons (even here) George managed to keep most of the hundreds of young plants in pots alive and has taken on all manner of jobs we had managed to postpone indefinitely. Sadly we say goodbye to him for the winter, but he lead a team of volunteers (thanks Jamie, Aiko, Lisa & Simon) this weekend in a blaze of walling and woodland clearance. Haste ye back!

Club Tropicana

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 09:30:00 +0000

Whilst I have left Lawson Park in the safe hands of our new gardener George, I’ve been spending three weeks in rural north-west Japan, on an arts project within the Echigo Tsumari Triennale exhibition. It’s really the first time I’ve been outside of Europe to a place with so much horticultural novelty. To the European eye, one of the most painful things to witness here is the regular maintenance of mountain paths, which requires hacking down overgrown acers and other rare-to-us trees by the dozen.

Our village, Toge, produces Japan’s finest rice, apparently due to abundant summer rain and heavy winter snow which stays put for months. And boy can it rain – and coming from someone who lives in the Lake District and was brought up on the west coast of Scotland, that’s saying something.
The land below the velvety forests is steeply terraced, with small-ish, spring fed rice paddies divided by ditches and banks of verdant wild undergrowth. On closer inspection this undergrowth is made up of some recognisable plants: macleaya cordata (plume poppy), aruncus diocus, various small bamboos, a kind of carex grass, vines and the occasional orange lily. Further afield one drives past what look like Madonna lilies also growing wild – large stems of showy white blooms. Morning glory, blue hydrangea, phlox, rudbeckia and daisy-like coreopsis seem common on the fringes of gardens, as are various crocosmia and species gladioli – I’m not sure if these are native or not.
Gardens here rarely have dividing boundaries, and lack many of the characteristics one associates with Japanese gardens traditionally: it’s a farming community and I guess they have no time for fiddly bonsai. However, each house has a rectangular or sometimes corner-shaped pond right by it, usually filled with waterlilies and carp.
Highly productive vegetable gardens are sited on level areas close to every house - there are few areas of useful land unused – even small triangles of ground by roads are filled with vegetables. The soil seems to be clay subsoil with sandy topsoil. The dominant crops are aubergines and cucumbers though there are many unfamiliar shoots and stems in between that I would like to identify.
Maintenance-wise, the fight against weeds must be a depressing task: horsetail and others grow inches per day and only the tomatoes and aubergines are mulched with plastic. I expect the banks between terraces are allowed to grow wild to prevent subsidence, and much of the leafy growth is eaten too. I was curious as to why the weeding I have seen is done by just removing the top growth with a machete, and I suspect it’s both for eating and because root removal would encourage land subsidence in the next heavy downpour. Composting seems not to happen here and I am curious as to why, as I’d expect the humid heat to enable very fast decay. The only top dressing I have noticed looked a lot like dried rice husks sprinkled around young plants – as I haven’t seen any snail or slugs I’m not sure what this does.

By our house and in the most appallingly wet conditions, a noted Japanese landscape architect has designed and installed a rather bizarre garden which marries European-style flower-planting with Japanese hard landscaping. Some noteable features include chicken-wire gabions filled with pebbles as pond-banks, heavily charred hardwood as a building and water feature material (I’ve read this is believed to preserve the timber), and a high stacked log wall. The quality of the materials is very high, and they are used very simply, however the workmanship of the installation is rather poor - this might be because it’s a ‘show garden’, but there’s a real sense that it could all slip off down the hillside during the next downpour.

Humble beginnings

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Wed, 10 May 2006 18:21:00 +0000

This, dear reader, is destined THIS YEAR to become a new kitchen garden! It's an area around 60m x 40m, gently sloping south west and previously smothered in bracken. Our produce will be grown in raised beds with imported topsoil , and we are optimistically layering cardboard between what remains of the bracken and the topsoil to attempt an organic eradication of the pest....Watch this space for news on whether that works....
Since this photo was taken, the lucky beehives have received their own levelled off area (though their honeycomb shaped shed remains as yet unfinished though tres rustique) and two massive compost bins have been installed. However, a bizarre local famine of the planned larch poles means we will be sadly using more 'finished' planks to make the beds, though this will no doubt give the are a more stylish appearance.
What was it the contractor said when gazing down at it ?
"It's never gonna be Kew Gardens, is it?"
Au contraire, mate!

On God's side of the Pennines

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:31:00 +0000

I know this is strictly off-topic, but a jaunt over east-ways to North Yorkshire a few weeks ago yielded some horticultural delights that should not be missed:
Firstly is 'Aysgarth Edwardian Rock Garden' which I only found because we pulled up right next to it for a quick on-the-road kip. It's a charming old-style rock garden, privately maintained largely and free to visitors dawn to dusk, with a checkered past which even includes garden gnome marketing. A few rare plants suvive and there's an exquisite atmosphere of faded, eccentric grandeur about it all.
Directions on getting there and more info are here.

Next, was this fabulous conifer hedge, somewhere near the afore-mentioned garden. What I like so much about it is that although it's clearly formed out of conical-shaped conifers, these individual outlines have been re-instated into the hedge by its owner - almost like carving.

Finally, we detoured near Middlesborough to the magnificent Guisborough Allotments which we spotted from the road, a huge sprawl of colourful plots, each with unique and fascinating idiosyncrasies - buildings, fancy poultry, brassicas, fencing...Long may the developers stay away from this place, it's a remarkable feat of human ingenuity.

That's my garden you're mountain-biking on

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Sun, 16 Apr 2006 19:57:00 +0000

It's no secret that the Easter break can be a challenging time for us locals. I solve the inevitable road rage threat by not going out, and instead spend the weekend getting some bits of the garden ship shape. This doesn't entirely remove me from the tourists, as our garden is bisected by a bridle-way down to Brantwood, a favourite spot for speeding mountain cyclists to stop for a breather.
Terrible recent weather and a broken digger have severely delayed our new kitchen garden (I have had to pray for the fruit bushes to survive in their box, and packed the asparagus in damp sand), so instead I'm moving my ghastly wet bits of carpet around the new woodland garden (weed-removal the organic way) and planting some large areas around new trees with a mixture of Deschampsia cespitosa and Tellima grandiflora (both indestructible in other areas of the garden) in naturalistic swathes. I am hoping to avoid what sometimes afflicts woodland /shrub gardens here in the Lakes -a kind of bitty-ness where you clambour around steep ground dotted with specimen plants - by underplanting our new trees with very large numbers of a very limited palette of plants - mainly grasses which I have propagated.
I can't wait for the area to get growing so that the pathways I have left between the palnted areas can really take form - and I can see if what I think is going to work, will!

The Rites of Spring

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:23:00 +0000

After an incredibly harsh March with several weeks under more than a feet of snow, much of the garden is showing wear and tear bordering on carnage: brown eucalyptus leaves, singed ceonothus, crocus (those that survived the rodents) prostrate and sodden after days of torrential rain.
However - like all gardens - on closer inspection there is much to celebrate: Some other crocus - later ones- are creamy and fresh amongst the vivid pink heathers (Vivelli & March Seedling), caltha palustris (white form) is peeping out, semiaquilegia and sedum are showing greyish knobs of growth, and in the polytunnel everything is leafy and my beertraps are full of baby slugs. Elsewhere in the Lakes the tourist-magnets, the daffodils, are beginning to show but mine - newly planted narcissi 'February Gold' on the whole - are ignoring their named destiny as yet.

Winter at last

noreply@blogger.com (Karen Guthrie) — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 00:26:00 +0000