Great things still happen at Great Dixter

Fifteen years after the death of its famous occupant, Christopher Lloyd, I have been back to the garden at Great Dixter in Sussex. I last saw it on a summer’s day when Christopher’s beloved dachshund Tulip was gravely ill under a blanket in the kitchen.

The memory has not kept me away. The delay has been due to time and distance, because other gardens, not least my own, have to take priority. My visit ranks as the best day of my year so far.

Gardens never stand still, but great things have continued to happen at Dixter. The garden is open every day of the week from 11am to 5pm, except on Mondays that are not bank holidays. Currently, tickets must be booked in advance online (greatdixter.co.uk, for details). The plant nursery is open every day from 9am to 5pm and also dispatches orders by mail. The plants are home grown, usually small but in readily transferable garden soil.

One of them is a favourite Lloyd rose, Florence Mary Morse, an upright bush with rose-red semi-double flowers and the great merit of repeating from early summer onwards. Bred in Germany, it has been almost forgotten in Britain, but is prominent in Dixter’s long border. Lloyd gave me one many years ago, after a memorable exchange in his nursery area.

I had visited with an ebullient lady from New York who was especially keen to meet the great man. “When I last came here,” she effused to him, trapped by a cold frame, “I bought a wonderful tin of beeswax polish from your dear lady wife: could she ever let me have another one?” “She is not exactly here,” Lloyd retorted. Indeed not, as he certainly never married.

In return he gave me Florence Mary Morse, but it died in last year’s dry spring. Smiling, I have bought a replacement on site, planning to give it a damp place.

Great Dixter remains a standard bearer for adventurous gardening, conducted with “dynamism and meant to be joyous”. I am borrowing the words of its masterly head gardener Fergus Garrett, an essential genius of the place, working side by side with a team of five under-gardeners.

Great Dixter is now owned by a charitable trust, with Fergus as chief executive and an excellent mission to teach and spread the knowledge of gardening. The garden has to meet its running costs from visitors’ tickets, study days and plant sales. It aims to welcome up to 50,000 visitors a year.

“I cannot let him down,” Fergus remarked to me as we looked at his recent rivers of tulips, stripy orange Ballerina and glowing red Pieter de Leur on either side of pathways in the stock plant area. As if he ever could or would: he became Lloyd’s head gardener in 1992 and grew to know the workings of his sharp and unpredictable mind through daily conversations and decisions.

Lloyd invited ideas from his gardener and did not always oppose them. Three of his vetoes, relevant this month, applied to the combination of lilac-blue Tulip Bleu Aimable and blue forget-me-nots, the big-flowered zinnia Benary’s Giant Rose and any sign of cow parsley in the long border.

The tulip and forget-me-not combo is now flowering in the long border, looking very chic. The zinnia appears in summer and the cow parsley has crept into border edges from the meadow.

I am with Lloyd on the cow parsley, thinking it a plant for roadsides and wild places. I am with Fergus on the increased areas of tall wild fennel, Ferula communis, not feathery foeniculum. Its massive flower stalks are about to carry big heads of yellow flowers on plants raised from seed off the walls of Istanbul, collected by Fergus, befitting his Turkish parentage.

The border’s cow parsley is flowering on the direct sight line from Lloyd’s last resting place. Where are the great gardener’s ashes to be found? They are under a crab-apple tree, the Asian Malus baccata, which flowers freely and is widely used as a root stock for other varieties. Crabby but generous, it might seem an artful choice for the remains of Lloyd, who could be both.

In fact, it was a tree appreciated by him and his great gardening neighbour in Kent, “Cherry” Collingwood Ingram, the maestro of flowering cherry trees. His ashes under the crab apple are in Dixter’s celebrated meadow garden, looking back on to the long border, which has never looked better without him.

In this superb year for bluebells, primroses and cowslips, I went to Dixter with the aim of discussing meadow planting with Fergus. I have never meadow gardened myself, but I have watched it fluctuate in others’ care and in popularity. It has certainly never stood higher than now, appealing to labels like conservation, responsible gardening and eco-planting.

It is almost always a myth that a “meadow” can be made by stripping off luxuriant turf and scattering bags of wild-flower seed over the underlying surface. Like Dixter, I would not give rolls of “wild-flower turf” so much as the time of day. They are thin strips of turf and when laid, the wild flowers have difficulty in rooting down from them into the soil of their new venue.

Individual plants of cowslips, primroses, scabious and so forth are a better way to go, but they must be planted in spaces kept free of competing plants, a job best done by spot applications of weedkiller. Contrary to vocal lobbies, there is no long-term damage in doing so responsibly.

The Dixter motto, I learnt at ground level, is that one size does not fit all. Aspiring meadow gardeners are best advised to proceed slowly, use their eyes and watch for the many local differences in any one stretch of potential meadow. Lloyd and Fergus’s classic book Meadows at Great Dixter and Beyond was reprinted by the small Pimpernel Press in 2016 with a new long introduction and is an invaluable guide.

Study days on meadow gardening at Dixter combine practical sessions in the meadow with lectures and a full survey of the subject: the next one is on June 21. Try to attend before you are stampeded into stripping off your top soil with a mechanical digger.

We walked past the Dixter barn where an area of lawn had been left unmowed. At first it was colonised with plants such as the rose-pink Carthusian dianthus. The introductions never took hold, but up from the soil came long-dormant orchids instead, part of the hidden seed bank.

In the main meadow too, there are very few primroses, no harebells and hardly any cowslips. Their absence there is a lesson that meadows vary, often within several metres. Instead this meadow is full of rare green-winged orchids, part of its undisturbed heritage. They are purple flowered, not green at all.

Unlike many meadows, Dixter’s is ancient. It is never mown until mid-August. All the cut grass is carted away and bags of Dixter hay are then sold or given to visitors. I had to stop, train my untrained eyes and then appreciate the many little colonies waiting to emerge, from knapweed to hawkbit. If this is meadow gardening, give me more of it, planned from the bottom up, not the top down.

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