Here’s another catch-up blog. So big and daunting that I’ve broken it into parts for your reading pleasure. I'm again a day behind so bear with me.

Part 1: A Walk in the Parks

After paying garden entry fees and various transportation fares I decided today was going to be a “free” day, so I headed for the parks. Try as they might, they can’t charge you for walking.

I started out from Earl’s Court and made for Hyde Park. Coming from the west I entered at Kensington Gardens, a part I hadn’t seen during my last trip. I suppose as a landscape architecture student I shouldn’t be surprised, but it really is amazing how fast the noise and bustle of a street like Kensington High Street can just melt away once you walk far enough into a park. The roar of engines is replaced by the jingling of dog collars, the rush of wind through trees, the idle chatter (in many foreign languages) of passers-by, and the scuff of your own footsteps on asphalt. I walked up to the palace, through its formal gardens and around the lake before stopping for some tea at the cafe along the Serpentine that my uncles had taken me to on my first full day in London a little more than a year ago. One of the many advantages of coming back to a place multiple times is that you get to see it in different lights. I’ve now seen Hyde Park in the depths of wet, miserable English winter, in the bright, sunny days of early summer when the leaves are fresh and the people sunburned, and now I’ve seen it in the warm glow that typifies the intersection of summer and fall. The place was humming with people. Hyde Park, like Sissinghurst, is proof that the classics are the classics for a reason. The park is designed in the historic pastoral mode of other iconic Picturesque landscapes like Blenheim Palace or Stourhead – there is nothing sleek or contemporary about it – but people flock to it because it is a world-class people place, a stage for the unfolding of urban life.

Hyde Park, unlike its North American contemporaries, has aged gracefully. This is no doubt due to the massive, almost incomprehensible amount of wealth concentrated in London (a luxury that few cities have), but I’m sure it’s equally due to the amount of love and loyalty Londoners have to their parks. They don’t just accept them as is either, they demand greatness and it would appear that the city officials and parks authorities have taken this to heart. Much like gardens, parks are only as good as the maintenance and tender loving care that goes into them. The more care and commitment you show a place, the more people treasure it and want to maintain its greatness.

Hyde Park

Kensington Gardens

From Hyde Park I gleefully strolled through my old London stomping grounds, past Buckingham Palace, along Pall Mall, through Trafalgar Square (one of my very favourite places), down Whitehall to say hello to Big Ben and along the Thames before catching a subway to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

Trafalgar Square

Although it can be a bit of a trek (and an expensive tube ride) to get to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park it is definitely worth it. Once you walk through the new, very shiny and very depressing Westfield Shopping Centre a magnificent vista unfolds. Ahead lies the Olympic Stadium, still in the process of being renovated into a Premier League venue, a sight that still brings chills and memories of the fantastic London Olympics. Walking over the bridge toward the stadium the park stretches out on either side, flanking the River Lea. Before the 2010 Olympic games the River Lea was essentially an open sewer, a drain of toxins running off from the nearby industrial hub of Stratford. Part of the park mandate was to remediate the river and now, thanks to the cleansing wetlands incorporated within the park, in many places it is fringed with wetland plants and even lined with docks that take eager tourists on river cruises. I still doubt it’s swimmable, but it certainly appears to be a river on the mend.

The thing that first captures your eye at the park is the fantastic planting of course, but also the topographic variation to the landscape. They weren’t going for gently rolling hills with this park. They were going for big, dramatic sculpted landforms. The result is a sequence of valleys and ridges that radiate out like waves from the river. The paths follow, cut through and traverse these landforms and smoothly move you through the different landscapes, from low wetlands to upland meadows to wooded hillsides. It’s a great example of how you can create individually unique enclaves and spaces within such a large park by carefully considering the topography and the vegetation that will clothe it.

The planting was, as expected, wonderful. Just as the gardens I’ve seen are definitely plant-lover’s gardens, this is a plant-lover’s park. At first, since I’d become accustomed to visiting private gardens, I could only see the flaws (the occasional dead plant, bare patches, plants falling over), but then I realized that I was not in a privately managed landscape but instead in a public space, one of the most ambitious to be created in England in recent memory and my perspective changed. The scale of the planting is impressive. Massive areas that would have been much easier to simply cover with turf or paving are rich tapestries of wildflowers and grasses and are brimming with floral and animal life. The North American gardens were looking particularly good since September is the season of the late summer wildflowers like asters, goldenrods, rudbeckias, and compass plants, all of which combine supremely well with grasses. The diversity and aesthetic richness of the plantings is a theme that carries over regardless of where you are in the park. Whether it be a playground, a plaza, a lawn or a cafe, you’re always within site of a glorious display and that is something that I think must become the norm in city parks. It’s too good to ignore and people so obviously love it.

The Oudolf gardens

Verbena and Rudbeckia in the North American gardens

Agastache and Deschampsia: match made in heaven

One of the valley hillsides

The playground on the far side of the park as you approach the Velodrome, is fantastic. A great big play structure with tunnels, slides, little wood platforms on springs, logs on rollers, rope climbers, an interactive water feature, it’s all enough to send today’s parent into a stress-induced seizure; the true mark of a good playground. One curious feature though is the inclusion of some awful thorny shrubs lining the paths. It seems a pretty rude thing to include these little devils with a bunch of nice soft grasses (Mexican feather grass if you’re interested) that invite touch. It’s also downright negligent considering the thorns are right at the head height of all the toddlers careening around. This is one instance where I’ll side with the overprotective parent. The only reason I can think of including them is to deter people from walking through the plantings, something that is clearly an issue in other areas of the park. Deter they do, quite forcefully I might add.

The playground

My only other real problem with the park is with its pathways. It sounds like a trivial criticism, but in some places the paths really are quite strangely laid out. The geometry of the park is its strongest aesthetic feature, but in the case of paths and people’s walking patterns, rigid straight lines don’t always make sense. There were a couple of cases where there were no formal paths to the top of landforms that promised wonderful panoramic views, instead people had worn their own paths to the summits, a sure sign of a missed opportunity. In other cases paths seemed to lead to nowhere, or took a frustratingly indirect route, apparently in the name of aesthetics. As I mentioned earlier, some of the plantings do seem a bit trampled in some places, but this is surely a failure of the paths, not the plants. A final quibble, though admittedly nothing the design team could really do anything about, is with the size of some of the paths. During the Olympics, when hundreds of thousands of people populated the parks, the paths needed to be wide, but now, when the park is sparsely populated they feel far too big, like you’re walking down an empty street instead of rambling through a park on a path. Again, short of tearing up the paths and replacing them with narrower ones, there’s nothing the designers could do here and hopefully once the neighbourhoods surrounding the park fill up and once more Londoners discover this wonderful place the paths won’t feel so obviously empty.

Part 2: Kew

Tuesday I decided I could stomach paying another entry fee, so it was off to Kew.

The Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew is an iconic place for gardeners, horticulturalists, botanists, ecologists, and anyone else with an interest in the plant world. Its collections are truly exceptional and altogether a bit overwhelming. The site alone is massive, one of the largest green spaces in London, but combine that with an astounding diversity of plants, from all corners of the world and it does leave your head spinning.

After taking a short walk from the Underground station you reach the gates and are almost immediately greeted by the world-famous palm house. It’s a fascinating building, exceptionally ornate and delicate looking, almost as if the palms that are stuffed inside could easily push through the glass any moment they wished. In front of the palm house are some of the most frankly offensive looking Victorian annual beds I’ve ever seen. At Great Dixter the dahlias look like they belong because they’re growing with plants that can calm them down. At Kew they remind me why I had such a passionate dislike for them. They’re grouped with other plants like heliotrope and awful begonias – plants that are grown for maximum colour. When you garden for maximum colour you get minimum substance. It’s cotton candy gardening. Intensely sweet, but there’s just nothing to it, it’s unsatisfying and leaves you feeling empty.

The palm house and parterre

Thankfully the more visually restful woodland garden was just around the corner. September really isn’t the ideal time for a woodland garden since most of these plants are at their best in the spring and begin to decline shortly thereafter, but there were some gems within the browning leaves. As I walked through the woodland garden and the grass garden later on, I took copious photos of the plants that caught my eye. If there is any place in the world where a prospective landscape designer can expand their plant vocabulary, it’s at Kew. Chances are if it’s a plant, you can find it here. One of my favourite parts of the visit was the alpine house. Alpine plants have a special sort of mystique. Since they grow in unbelievably inhospitable environments, many have uniquely alien-looking adaptations. Some, for example, have no leaves, others may only have a couple, but almost all of them have wonderfully delicate flowers, the reason they’ve become so popular with hobby gardeners. In particular the scilla, cyclamen, gladiolus, and alliums looked especially good. Unfortunately, as wonderful as the alpine house was, the rest of the rock garden was a bit disappointing. First I should admit that rock gardens in general don’t do much for me, but, again, like at the University of Bristol Botanical Gardens, these display gardens are not made to be beautiful, they’re made to showcase collections of individual plants. In the rock garden especially, where the plants are diminutive and meek, this makes for an underwhelming experience. The display is interesting, with boulders and constructed ledges providing habitats for the plants, but on the whole it just looks too much like a collection and not enough like a garden. It doesn’t do the plants justice. The same could be said for the plant family beds and the grass gardens. They’re full of interesting plants and proved quite valuable for introducing me to cool new species, but as gardens they were nothing special. They didn’t make you feel anything for the plants that were there, it was strictly utilitarian.

The alpine collections

The rock gardens

 From these gardens I walked through the holly walk, and the arboretum before arriving at the conservation area in the back corner of the property. This was a lovely spot, messy and ragged, the necessary foil to the parterres and formal gardens. Birds darted up from the fallen leaves and squirrels skittered around and it occurred to me that only in the conservation area was wildlife really conspicuously present. It makes you feel completely different when you realize you are sharing a space with more than other humans and alarmingly domesticated Canada geese. After passing through a meadow (even in a garden with some of the most exotically fragrant plants in the world, nothing compares to the smell of a meadow in the autumn), the view opens to the meandering Thames. This is another wonderful moment in the garden as you can sit and look out over the Thames and realize that in some places it is just like a river like any other, unconstrained by stone walls, without bridges crossing over or subways crossing under it, and where willow leaves, not docks or walls mark the tidal water line. At Kew the Thames is a river uncorrupted and it’s beautiful.

The conservation area

From here I strolled back, through the oak collections (there are few trees that can compete with the majesty of a mature oak), past the gift shop and back out the gate toward the Underground.

I’m glad I went, and it is undoubtedly a place that a plant-lover has to go, but ultimately at the end of the visit I just couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that something was missing, that I was leaving somewhat unsatisfied. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistically high (a distinct possibility), but after some thought I landed on what I think is the root cause: there is no sense of community within the collections. The arboretum is beautiful, with majestic individual specimens, but it doesn’t have the special qualities of a forest. The rock garden is fascinating, but just not as beautiful as a wild alpine meadow. In the attempt to display as much plant life as is humanly possible (a noble and necessary task to be sure), aesthetics and the consideration for the spatial and experiential qualities of the landscape seem to have taken a back seat. The displays feel too compartmentalized and cold, the plants don’t seem to relate to each other or want to interact with each other instead preferring to remain solitary. It’s a case in point that simply assembling a collection of individually interesting and unique plants doesn’t make an interesting and unique garden. It makes an excellent exhibit or display, but a garden it is not.

After Kew I spent a leisurely afternoon in the city. I went back to the Garden Museum, a very small but lovely museum just across from the Houses of Parliament, featuring a gorgeous border by Dan Pearson.

Dan Pearson's border at the Garden Museum

From here I walked toward City Hall, stopping to pop into Tate Modern for a bit of culture and pausing numerous times along the river to take in the magnificent London skyline punctuated by St. Paul’s Cathedral. Walking along the Thames is always a delight, there’s so much life. Street performers, buskers, pop-up stalls selling used books, and people by the hundreds. I revelled in it all until the sun set and made for Earl’s Court.

The Thames and St Paul's

Tower Bridge

A hazy London sunset

Part 3: Wonderful Wild Waltham

Yesterday the outing was again outside the city of London in Waltham, near Maidenhead. I spent the morning pottering around the Natural History Museum that was steps from my hostel in Earl’s Court. I was especially impressed with their wildlife garden outside, with demonstration gardens illustrating the different habitats of the UK. The garden is small and sandwiched between the museum’s sleek new addition and the busy Cromwell Road, so it’s hardly a place to go for peace and quiet, especially with all the gleefully screaming children tearing around on school trips with haggard looking chaperones trailing pitifully behind. The garden is a ragged, unkempt jungle, an oasis of wildness in the heart of London and therein lies its real value. If you want peace and quiet, go to the countryside, but if you want to watch some bees and butterflies, some docile sheep grazing a meadow, and maybe even see a frog or two all without leaving the comfy confines of the city, go to the wildlife garden at the Natural History Museum.

This little excursion put me in a good state of mind after my slightly disappointing experience at Kew the previous day, so it was with high spirits that I boarded the train to Maidenhead.

I barely made it to Waltham in time for my 2:00 tour, the transportation was a bit of a debacle, but I made it with enough time to enjoy some delightful tomato soup made from the produce from the farm (the Waltham estate involves both a wild garden and a biodynamic farm focused on holistic methods of food production).

Just as I was sitting down with my soup the shopkeeper who had realized that I was the young Canadian who had emailed about a tour called me over to introduce me to Waltham’s head gardener Beatrice Krehl. Beatrice insisted that she take me on a personal tour, she said she much preferred giving tours to landscape architects who could converse with her on a different level than the casual garden observer. I had been expecting a group tour, so to find out that I was not only getting a personal tour, but one with the head gardener no less, was a fantastic development.

Beatrice was a delight, incredibly personable, immensely knowledgeable and definitely another kindred spirit. I knew I would encounter a few. When I told her how I’d heard about Waltham through the BBC TV programme “Gardener’s World” she remarked about how much she loved speaking with presenter Carol Klein (an English gardening icon in her own right), and how worried she was that nobody would understand her wonderful Swiss accent. It is a strange hybrid, sounding at once German, Dutch, and a bit French, but I hung on her every word with ease. She was a wealth of knowledge and I was keen to get as much as I could.

Beatrice had worked for years at the gardens of Mien Ruys, the pioneering Dutch designer whose work with wild plants inspired the next generation of Dutch designers like Piet Oudolf and his lesser-known but equally skilled contemporary the late Henk Gerritsen. Gerritsen was the reason I’d come to Waltham Place. I’d known he was, along with Oudolf, one of the designers that made the naturalistic use of perennials in gardens so popular, but compared to Oudolf, he was far less prolific in terms of garden making, coming to the field of garden design quite late in his career.

Judging by Beatrice’s descriptions, Gerritsen was a fiery character. He insisted he was the only one allowed to photograph his gardens (photography at Waltham is usually forbidden, but Beatrice graciously granted me special permission), and was passionately committed to his personal philosophy of gardening, insisting that every other garden was inferior to his. He was also a master with the pruning shears. The spectacular cloud hedges of box that bound the front of his borders in the walled garden are wonderful but immensely time consuming – for everyone but Henk. He would apparently travel to Waltham from Holland and in a weekend have the hedges done, managing to find the time to take an unhealthy number of cigarette breaks and chat with visitors and gardeners in between his frenetic bouts of pruning. All in all he sounds like the kind of guy you would love to have a beer with, but a personality that you would have to take in doses. His character aside, Gerritsen created a masterful garden at Waltham and unlike Kew the day before, it exceeded even my highest expectations.

If Sissinghurst is a proper English lady, then Waltham is her hippy cousin with dreadlocks and mismatched socks.

Beatrice told me that unlike Sissinghurst, where plants are situated precisely and anything in between is a weed that needs to be pulled, at Waltham it was more about tinkering. Rather than pull everything that doesn’t belong, plants are allowed to seed around with seedlings selectively nurtured or removed depending on how they impact the composition. Some plants have had to be reigned in (Beatrice admitted that Henk had planted some problems for her, and that this year the garden has definitely defeated her best intentions), but in general because they are selected based on complementary ecologies (competitive plants paired with equally competitive plants, mobile plants paired with mobile plants), the garden can more or less proceed on its own. It would be a great joy to be in Beatrice’s shoes and watch how the garden changes and grows from one season to the next. The great thing about this method of planting is because it’s so dynamic you never get the same thing twice. People know what to expect at places like Kew and to a lesser extent Sissinghurst and Dixter, but here the garden is more like a wild plant community, always in flux. The overall sense that creates is a place that is wonderfully free, free to be itself and free to grow relatively unhindered by human touch.

The walled garden

The walled garden is definitely a highlight, but far from the only notable place on the estate. I didn’t obsessively photograph Waltham, electing to chat with Beatrice and look closely at the various places we passed, so you’ll have to use your imagination a bit (or Google it if you just can’t stand it). From the walled garden we walked through the veg patch and stock beds that were filled with a random assortment of plants that were waiting for their moment to be planted in the main gardens. We walked through the farmyard past the pig pen where the young piglets were enjoying their first day outside, along the cow pasture, past the simmering pile of leaf mould that Beatrice and I dug through in search of critters, through the parkland planted with stately beeches and oaks, by the new wild garden that was essentially a mown parterre with crisp edges of lawn contrasted with wildflowers and grasses before finally arriving at the long border facing the house. Gerritsen, like Oudolf at Durslade and Lloyd at Great Dixter has thrown convention to the wind here. The borders are enclosed by a massive yew hedge, again pruned into a cloud shape to merge more gently with the canopies of the woodland beyond, and broken up by semicircles of clipped beech hedges. Between these semicircles was a wonderful array of wild plants, very few of which would look at home in a typical English border. It was another wonderful statement about the power of combining unabashed wildness with strictly clipped formality.

The long borders

As I sat on the train back to London, reflecting on the garden, I realized that I could confidently say that Waltham Place is the best garden I’ve seen so far, and I’ve seen some good ones.

Now on to Sheffield, and the Peak District to get a bit of a countryside fix and to meet another of my heroes, James Hitchmough.