Great Dixter - Working Weekend

An excellent weekend of learning. I was expecting a quiet weekend pottering around, little did I realise I would be put hard to work on creating fresh compost according to a John Innes recipe.








The first step in this process is to use a turf cutter to take the top off a meadow and then to stack this high and let it decompose. From here, shavings are taken from one end and spread over an area and then top dressed with compost from the gardens which is comprised mainly of decomposed clippings from the meadows. These two parts are then rotary hoed together before being pout through a sieve. This fine material is the base of the compost, with pine bark, grit, and other additions made after it has been sterilised. It is backbreaking work, but I think one would agree that it makes a supreme growing medium, whereby plants will grow out of the media into its new surrounding soil quicker. This has been found on site at Great Dixter, primarily attributing to the fact that they are being grown in essentially the same soil they are to be planted into as stock.





Other notes I wish to make:
- they wrote the textbook on successional planting.
- Important to create a 4/5 successional planting over a few seasons.
- Work from knowing what you want it to look like in the peak period and go backwards to fill the gaps either side of this
- The results should look good in black and white, this depends on varying
o Colour, texture, form, height, of both flower, fruit and leaf
o Varying seasonal interest of one plant
Cornus with red stems, but variegated foliage
o Select best plants for the spot
- Climbers, evergreen, perennials, biennials and annuals (reseeders need managing!) all grow together and cohabit
o Its about balancing the number of plants so that one doesn’t swamp the other and they live in harmony. Bulbs will often die off if the other plantings around them are too thick and doent die down at the right time
o Good combo – agapnthus and crocossmia, two striking colours
o Use backdrops to the colour like the yew heges which are clipped in autumn to get the most prolonged length of crisp edges
o Even if a garden is designed and developed around the spring summer season, winter interest can be created by evergreen shrubs (the backbone of the garden), grasses which add structure and create interest on frosty mornings and winter flowering plants such as Galanthus, Crocus, Iris reticulata, Helleborus, Primula vulgaris and early flowering Narcissus.

- very organic in its organisational culture
o traditional methods of producing compost which they prop all their plants in
o it’s a very high maintenance garden
o the plant centre is tiny and traditional and there is no desire to enhance things and put in a coffee shop as this will then lose the character of the place. This is just one example of many whereby the traditional horticultural practices are conserved at the expense of non commercialisation and lack of increasing margins.