GARDEN : On the Wild Side : As Naturalistic Gardens Come More Into Vogue, the Traditional Dividing Line Between Flowers and Weeds Is Becoming Blurred

A NEW ENTHUSIASM for “wild” gardens has arisen this century. Many gardens now feature a special wilderness area in which plants are encouraged to mix freely and attract all kinds of insects and mammals. The traditional dividing line between flowers and weeds is becoming blurred. As wildflowers are increasingly threatened with extinction in their natural habitats, more people are introducing them into their gardens. One attractive way of conserving endangered species of wild plants is to create a “wild” lawn, where traditional hedgerow flowers mingle with mixed long grasses. By careful planting, color and interest can be maintained throughout the year.

The movement in favor of natural gardening at the end of the 19th Century was headed by William Robinson. It did not go unchallenged, however. The publication in 1892 of “The Formal Garden in England,” by Reginald Blomfield and F. Inigo Thomas, presented a strong case for the revival of formalism in garden design. Gertrude Jekyll herself, a staunch supporter of Robinson’s ideas, learned to modify her approach in her collaboration with the architect Edwin Lutyens, adapting plants and color schemes to blend skillfully with garden layouts that incorporated many more formal gardens.

In the end, it is Gertrude Jekyll’s influence, perhaps more than anyone else’s, that has permeated garden development in our own century, bringing together the best of styles inherited from the past in a happy compromise, a blend of formal and informal, the peak of man-made art with the glories of the plant world. Her genius was in her ability to select exactly the right balance of color, form and texture to match new architectural schemes, to meet the search for beauty in its natural form and to deal with the demands of a changing world.

And, indeed, the world was changing fast. The days of the great estates were numbered; wealthy patrons were a dwindling race. Already the introduction of estate duty in 1894 had affected the balance of riches, and there was appreciably less money to be spent on the embellishment of large gardens. World War I destroyed forever the established order; labor became expensive and money became short. Another generation of gardeners emerged, keen amateurs with their small plots on the housing estates that grew like a rash around all the big towns between the wars. They gardened for pleasure, doing their own work, and they were hungry for information. That was furnished by a proliferation of gardening books and magazines that were published--and are still being produced--to satisfy the growing demand.

THE NEAT SUBURBAN garden of the 20th Century, with its trimmed hedges and bedding plants, was in quite a different category from the old cottage garden that had enjoyed special limelight in Gertrude Jekyll’s writings. Hers was a romanticized concept, however, more closely related to a reduced version of the herbaceous border of a big estate than the truly traditional cottage garden. That was a far more practical affair, a means of survival for the rural poor, where they could grow vegetables and fruit to support themselves and supplement an otherwise restricted diet. Though flowers were often grown, they were a luxury and consisted mostly of traditional kinds, such as roses and marigolds, cornflowers, sunflowers and hollyhocks. The “cottage gardens” Jekyll advocated were more likely to be found attached to the houses of the better off.

The romanticized view of the cottage garden was fostered by the paintings of such artists as Helen Allingham, who at one time was an illustrator for the novelist Thomas Hardy. She devoted her time to painting cottages and their gardens, especially in the south of England.

The country cottages that Allingham painted from life are as natural-looking, colorful and quaint as one could ever imagine an English home to be. They were idealized pictures of working houses, with women in bonnets, women and children, chickens and ducks; picturesque views of streams, hills and tiny bridges, waysides full of wildflowers, colorful herbaceous borders, rambling roses covering wattle-and-daub walls reaching to thatched or tiled roofs. Tall elms and poplars stand in the fields and along the lanes. Her paintings seem to show perpetual spring and summer, always a riot of color. Dismal winter scenes are not depicted.

The wildness of the gardens surrounding the cottages are particularly striking. Tall hollyhocks, sunflowers, white lilies, delphiniums, old roses, lilacs, snapdragons and cornflowers sometimes rubbed shoulders with huge cabbages or fruit trees. Those were times of very formal gardens and earth paths. The rich vegetation suggests reliance upon staple perennial plants mixed with a few opportunist annuals. The old English herbal plants, such as tansy, yarrow, pansies and lavender all grow together. Beyond the gates and the untidy hedges, wildflowers crowd out the lane-side grasses, making a pattern of color that people today try to re-create with their “instant meadow” mixes.

REMINDERS OF the old-fashioned cottage garden where plants are raised in casual association and allowed to seed themselves can be seen in some of the outstanding gardens of our own times. One of the finest examples is Sissinghurst, creation of Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962). With her husband, Harold Nicolson, she made two gardens, the first between 1915 and 1930 at Long Barn, near Sevenoaks in Kent, and the second at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent between 1930 and 1961. Now managed by the National Trust, Sissinghurst is probably the most visited garden in Britain.

When Vita Sackville-West took over the Elizabethan manor at Sissinghurst it was exceedingly run-down. She and Nicolson started from scratch and established a series of walled and hedged gardens, avenues and herb gardens that would delight both botanists and naturalists. Between 1947 and 1961, she wrote extensively on everyday gardening matters for The Observer and did much to popularize gardening, publishing a series of books that included “In Your Garden” (1951) and “Even More for Your Garden” (1958).

The charm of Sissinghurst is its natural effect. Vita Sackville-West vigorously opposed the formal tidiness of gardens and encouraged plants to grow wherever their seedlings sprang up or their boughs overhung the paths. She gardened in a patchwork of walled or yew-hedged compartments that were integrated into what was left of old Elizabethan courtyards. Her husband planned the layout of both Long Barn and Sissinghurst.

One spectacular feature is the white garden, which was planted with white and gray-colored species set off by the dark foliage of the box hedge. There are Rosa alba , the White Rose of York; festoons of the Rosa filipes ; white almond blossom; the gray foliage of Scotch or cotton thistle; willow; white lamb’s tongue, and white delphiniums. On the walls are cascades of white clematis and the albino form of the cup-and-saucer plant ( Cobaea scandens ) from Mexico; growing up a pergola is the climbing potato vine. Those contrast well with the massed ranks of summer hyacinth ( Galtonia candicans ) planted in front of the dark box hedges.

The herb garden is another major attraction. In design it has hardly changed from the photographs taken there in the 1930s. Embraced by yew hedges, the small herb garden is packed with medicinal species that offer a potted history of herbal medicine in Europe, and, at the center, there is a pot of exquisite red sedums. Some of the more unusual plants grow here, such as the shoofly plant ( Nicandra physalodes ) and the real mandrake ( Mandragora officinarum ), not to be confused with the old English name for the red bryony ( Bryonia dioica-- it is said to scream violently if pulled up).

Hidcote, too, is an outstanding garden, considered by many to be the finest example of the 20th Century. Created by Maj. Lawrence Johnston from 1907 onward, Hidcote Manor was constructed on a cold site and consists of a series of small compartments protected by hedges behind which many semi-tender and unusual plants such as the Chilean climber ( Tropaeoleum speciosum ) have been successfully established. The art of Hidcote, like that of Sissinghurst, lies in its apparent naturalness. Aspects have been borrowed from the cottage garden, in the Jekyll tradition, with plants allowed their freedom, and there is a wild area in the valley called the Wilderness. Maj. Johnston, who died in 1957, was a knowledgeable plantsman, widely traveled, and the garden contains a number of interesting plants and trees, including a fine variety of hypericum named Hypericum patulum ‘Hidcote’ and the ‘Hidcote’ lavender.

Another exponent of the style of gardening developed by Gertrude Jekyll, with whom she has sometimes been compared, was Margery Fish (1892-1969). She converted an abandoned two-acre farmyard at East Lambrook Manor, Somerset, into an old-style cottage garden with 2,000 plant species. With a passion for gardening, she collected variegated and double forms and different cultivars of primrose (she had at least 60, some of which have now become extinct) and violets. She also experimented with growing hostas and begonias and in hybridizing hellebores. She turned her garden into a typically English cottage garden, and her writings--she wrote eight books--encouraged thousands of people to re-establish some of the old favorites among plant species. Popular titles were “Cottage Garden Flowers,” “Gardening on Clay and Limestone” and “We Made a Garden.” Today, her nursery is commemorated through plants such as Artemisia ‘Lambrook Silver,’ and visitors can still see Fish’s “pudding trees”--her carefully clipped Lawson cypresses .

WINSTON CHURCHILL (1874-1965) developed a keen interest in natural history and gardening at his country home of Chartwell. Set in an idyllic coombe on the North Downs in Kent and blessed with a regular source of water, Chartwell provided an excuse for Churchill to create pools at different levels (exercising his engineering skills), introduce wildlife and build himself a walled kitchen garden.

The simple but inspiring gardens are dominated by the views over the Weald of Kent and Sussex and the wooded scarps on the Downs. The invasive Victorian rhododendrons on the lawn were removed and the old house renovated. It was Churchill’s hope that on his death the National Trust, which now looks after Chartwell, would keep plenty of plants like buddleia and lavender to attract the colorful butterflies that he encouraged.

Lepidopterist L. Hugh Newman went to Chartwell in the spring of 1939 to introduce a butterfly colony. After the war, in 1946, Newman’s son continued the regular stocking of the gardens with butterflies and between 1,000 and 1,500 were released into the garden each year. The brick summerhouse was converted into a butterfly house--one of the first in England--using the wooden seats as benches on which to rear the caterpillars. Churchill would sit for hours watching the insects hatch and would then liberate them into his colorful garden. Species reared included the peacock butterfly, small tortoise shell, brimstone and the clouded yellow. The black-veined white was imported from the Continent and set free in the garden; it had become extinct in Britain after 1912 and was something of a curiosity.

In true Konrad Lorenz style, Churchill had a tame Canada goose that would follow him every time he walked down by the lakes. Lorenz had proved that goslings would accept as their “mother” whatever being reared them immediately after hatching. There was a robin that learned to feed from Churchill’s hand, and among his other pets at various times were a badger, a fox and a rather smelly sheep. He had tons of rocks sent down from Cumberland to create a water garden, and he stocked it with carp. He would sit at the pool-side and throw them maggots that were sent regularly from Yorkshire. There were also some famous black swans, a gift from the Australians. He planted limes, whose nectar-rich flowers attracted thousands of humming bees in early summer.

A living example of wildlife gardening can be seen at Great Dixter in Kent, the home of that connoisseur of gardening matters, Christopher Lloyd (born in 1921). The impressive 15th-Century manor house was extensively restored in 1910 by Sir Edwin Lutyens, who also fashioned its garden. There are magnificent splayed steps and walls at different levels from which can be admired the profusion and juxtaposition of rampant wild plants. The sunken garden is a picture of color and a bowl of scent, resplendent in spring with plants such as wood anemone, forget-me-not, white and purple honesty , lesser celandines, the greater periwinkle and wallflowers, and there are at least 15 species of grass. One surviving pair of mulberry trees overlooks the formal rose garden. The expanse of wild orchard is bedecked with fritillaries and narcissuses in the spring.

A major feature of Great Dixter is the dark yew hedges, either cut into bird forms or used to divide off small areas including the kitchen garden, nursery beds and colorful herbaceous borders. There are 18 of these quaint gardening compartments. The hedges also offer protection from the wind and show off the color of some lighter flowers with stunning effect.

Lutyens made great use of the old farm buildings in his design, and many a wall is hung with mature espaliered pears of antique proportions. Aubrieta, cotoneaster and Canary Island ivy drape the old walls, and blackbirds and thrushes nest in the thick hedges and find juicy worms in the flower beds. Swallows nest in the barns, and the collared doves recently introduced to Britain flit around the garden.

There is an air of Robinson and Jekyll about Great Dixter, of specially arranged color mixtures and different plant species growing together with great effect. In “The Mixed Border” (1986), Christopher Lloyd points out the reasons and advantages of having mixed borders: “In nature, plants mix all the time, so why not in the garden?” There are also likely to be fewer attacks from pests and diseases, as insects and disease pathogens cannot move next door to the same species, which they can do easily in, for instance, beds of roses.

Clematis are among Christopher Lloyd’s specialist groups. He has mastered the art of getting them to run through shrubs and trees, such as a stunning purple clematis twining through Pieris ‘Forest Flame.’ His famous long border is a riot of color in the summer with wild roses, giant alliums, delphiniums and salvias, hostas and phloxes; sedums and lady’s mantle creep over the flagstones; colorful annuals and biennials are planted everywhere. The giant herbaceous border is mixed with woody perennials, such as tamarisks, escallonias, magnolias and Dickson’s golden elm.

Christopher Lloyd did not invent wildflower gardening, but he is one of the few to foster it for public display. One of his special creations is the wild lawn--envied by most gardeners and naturalists who strive to have a trouble-free, colorful lawn that won’t succumb under long, lank grass. The springtime meadows that surround the timber-framed house are a riot of color from a host of wildflowers: early purple orchids, purple and white colored fritillaries, docks, primroses and primulas, and bluebells. Ordinary daisies and dandelions, cuckoo flowers (known also as milk maids and lady’s smock), wood anemone and buttercups also thrive, with cow parsley and various mixed grasses. In the autumn the lawns flower with autumn crocus and the borders with the tiny cyclamen . To create such an interesting diversity, it is actually necessary to put in a lot of work in cutting the grass at particular times of the year.

There is no one quite as renowned for meadow gardening as the naturalist Miriam Rothschild (born in 1907). Her private gardens are a carpet of flowers; in fact, it was Rothschild who generated the enormous interest in Britain in growing wildflowers for seed.

Starting in 1980 with an acre of cowslips grown for their seed, she now only considers a minimum area of about five acres as a viable proposition for seed production. The market for wildflower seed grew so quickly in the early 1980s that wildflower gardening on the grand scale is now the only profitable way. Daisy seed, for instance, remains a precious commodity for which there will always be a great demand, because it is such a typical “wild” flower and few people have the time, acreage or patience to produce and harvest the fine seed.

Rothschild gardens on the rich Northamptonshire soil at Ashton, where the village pub is named the Chequered Skipper after the rare butterfly. Now sadly extinct in England, it used to fly about the Ashton meadows. Around her house, Rothschild scatters wildflower seed in early spring to populate a colorful meadow; early purple and common spotted orchids mingle with campions, corncockles and cornflowers . It is no place for neatly clipped lawns, selective herbicides and fancy flower beds; the old greenhouses, once festooned with grapes, now house tropical butterflies, such as North American monarchs, South American heliconids and African and Asian swallowtails, which feed on passion flowers, milkweed flowers and heliotropes. The humble cabbage white butterfly is reared here for experimental purposes. Other wildlife is important too in Rothschild’s garden.

One of Rothschild’s latest ventures is marketing seeds of her Holy Land wildflowers through the noted seedsman John Chambers. Among the species now available are the Israeli cornflower, the blue mountain lupin and the Palestine campion .

Rothschild’s most widely seen contribution to wild gardening is her establishment of a typical medieval corn meadow outside the butterfly center at Stratford-Upon-Avon in 1986. It is jeweled with all the wildflowers of ancient meadows, many of which have now disappeared owing to the use of herbicides, loss of habitats and the improved mechanical techniques of separating (cleaning) weed seeds from the crop. Such species as corn marigold, cornflower, corncockle (the seeds of which used to cause gastroenteritis when ground up with the corn) and, the favorite, corn poppy sparkle between the stems of wheat. Among her many other enterprises have been the establishment of wildflower meadows on motorway verges and a private wildflower meadow at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, the country home of the Prince and Princess of Wales.

One of the finest historic houses in Britain, Sutton Place in Surrey, an early 16th-Century house built for King Henry VIII, now has a modern garden fit for wildlife. Very little remains of the original Tudor and Elizabethan gardens, save the walled kitchen garden. In the Georgian period, Capability Brown was invited here to make suggestions for landscaping but was apparently sent away after he suggested pushing aside the avenues of trees. Gertrude Jekyll went to Sutton Place in 1902 to advise on plantings and the yew hedges established by Lady Northcliffe were in accordance with her suggestions. Today, naturalists enjoy the specially planned wild woods and meadows, the wildfowl and many different wildflowers. Designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe in 1980, it is a complex of small gardens with a pleasant mixture of natural features.

Several different styles of gardening can be seen at Sutton Place, a blend of English gardening history; the classical style with the exhibition of statuary, like the Italian gardens of Hever; the Paradise Garden, a direct reference to some medieval gardens; the small, walled or hedged gardens (the East and West Walled Garden), so well mastered at Sissinghurst and Great Dixter, and in the Wild Garden the wildflower plantings of both Jekyll and Robinson.

In his grand plan for the gardens at Sutton Place--said to be the greatest gardening scheme since Chatsworth--Jellicoe has been particularly kind to wildlife on the estate. The newly created 25-acre lake in front of the house recalls the grand earth-moving scheme of Capability Brown. It attracts mallards, tufted ducks, pochard and little ringed plovers that nest on the banks, while mandarin ducks find a home among the old willows. The meadows are left free to blossom each year with a startling array of wildflowers. Snipe, duck and swans visit the wetter meadows. Old woods have been left untouched and are now managed for wildlife.

The breakdown of the gardens into smaller areas recalls Lutyen’s style and his fascination with enclosing walls. The specially built Nicolson wall offers a backdrop for espalier fruit trees and a shelter for the less hardy plants. The wild garden was designed for special plants, as Robinson preferred, and even mosses are brought to the forefront as a centerpiece in the moss or secret garden, ringing one of the trees--a most original feature, seen hardly anywhere else in gardens.

From “The Naturalist’s Garden,” by John Feltwell. Copyright 1987 by Templar Publishing Ltd., Surrey, England. Reprinted by permission of Salem House Publishers, Topsfield, Mass.