Continuity and Time
If you want to share these blogs with your friends so they can follow and receive the weekly email and podcast just send them this link and they’ll be able to sign up at the top of the page.
Birkie and the Topiary.
Sometimes you have conversations that just really resonate and stay with you for days afterwards, changing the way you see something. A couple of weeks ago in A glimpse of history, I wrote about my visit to meet Diana Boston to see the garden created by her mother-in-law Lucy Boston. Lucy had been inspired by childhood visits to Levens Hall and when she bought The Manor in 1939, she immediate set about planting some small Yew bushes with the intention of making topiary.
On Monday I brought together Diana Boston (who has lived at the Manor for over 30 years) and Chris Crowder who has been the Head Gardener of Levens Hall for 37 years. We talked about topiary, growing it and clipping it. But what really struck me was how both these gardeners seemed to have a different perspective because of the history, the continuity of the places where they live and garden.
Topiary in Levens Hall
Chris talked about how people view gardens today through different eyes to their predecessors. We are often viewing gardens through our cameras, our phones. We are looking for those beautiful shots to share and Chris thinks about how to provide us with those views. The topiary is perfect. But because of the incredible records they have at Levens Hall, he knows that previous generations came to view the individual plants. They had no problem with bare soil - they wanted to see a plant that might as well have come from a different planet - so unfamiliar was it.
Then Diana talked about how she can almost feel people relax when they walk around a garden full of buzzing insects. It’s almost as though there is a sigh of relief, the world cannot be as bad as we fear because the insects are still here. That led to a conversation about how the formal gardens were made to create a managed space, apart from the wild outside the garden walls. But now we are planting wild flowers in our gardens to attract insects because that ‘wild’ no longer contains any flowers. It maybe green but the wild flowers have gone.
Diana shared her mother’s maxim that a plant will probably move around three times before you find exactly the right spot for it and Lucy’s philosophy that you should never win in a garden. Both these two ideas seem a little at odds with our desire to plan out everything and install instant gardens.
I really hope you enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed making it. If you do have the space to plant a little Yew bush that you can grow and shape, which will inhabit that space long after we have all gone, for future generations to enjoy and care for, do let me know. And take a look at the amazing photos of the topiary in both their gardens on the episode page here - it may give some inspiration.
Lastly but not least I am looking to solve a bit of a puzzle. Yesterday there was a huge and exciting increase in the listens to the podcast and the visits to the website. The visits are literally coming from all over the world! I think some of these new listeners have signed up to this blog so I would love to know how you heard about this podcast. I try to write to International plant societies when I make a new episode because I am fascinated by the way a passion for a plant can connect people across continents. But however you have found us - WELCOME!