Lessons Learned from English Gardens

UC Master Gardeners Sally and Kris have prepared a show that’ll take you across the Atlantic Ocean to the birthplace of the English Garden. “Lessons Learned from English Gardens” is the topic. We have “formal” gardens as you can imagine in a Royal palace and you can have “informal” gardens that are also referred to as “Cottage Gardens”. The latter is one of the most prevalent types of design since Elizabethan times and typically very English. Sally and Kris toured many gardens in England and learned how very adaptable the English gardening techniques can be for local California gardens. They will compare notes and pass them along to you. Grab your crumpets and tea and sit down for an hour’s worth of international gardening tips you can put to use right now.   

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:21

This is the In the Garden Show produced by UCE Master Gardeners of Orange County. I'm Chris Bonner, your Master Gardener host for the hour. Today's program is Lessons Learned from English Gardens, featuring an interview with fellow Master Gardener Sally Richards. Good morning, Sally. It's really nice to have you on the show today.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Oh, thank you, Chris. It's fun to be here.

SPEAKER_02 0:40

Sally's a lifelong gardener who went through both the Master Gardener and KUCI training together, went through that together last year. Sally moved here from Michigan fairly recently and brought not only her gardening expertise, but fresh and different perspectives on gardening. Today's show is lessons learned from English Gardens and is inspired by a trip that Sally and a group of fellow Master Gardeners took last spring that included attending the world famous Chelsea Garden Show as well as ten other gardeners in southern England. The Chelsea Garden Show, formerly known as the Great Spring Show, is a garden show held in May by the Royal Horticultural Society of England and on the grounds in Chelsea, London. It's been going on since 1912 and is probably the most famous flower and landscape garden show in the United Kingdom and has attract attracted attracts people from all over the world. Lifelong learning is a core value of master gardeners, and travel is a fun and powerful way to learn about gardening. Our show is not a garden travel show. We want to bring ideas and perspectives from our travels to show how to incorporate these into our gardens here in Orange County. We also want to share the fun and excitement of gardening travel, hopefully to inspire you to visit botanic gardens, arboretums, garden shows and tours, be they near or far, to get inspiration for your home garden. So before we get into the specifics, Sally, give us an overview of this uh this wonderful tour that you took.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Well, this was one of those things that as I'm getting older I had to get my bucket list going and this was on it. I always wanted to see the Chelsea Garden show, and along with that, we were able to see ten different gardens in southern England, and so uh it was kind of a nice bus trip with fellow gardeners, and we saw a lot of English gardens that were formal and informal before we got to the garden show.

SPEAKER_02 2:36

Yeah, when I travel, I like to do what you do and uh to visit different gardens when I'm out and about and traveling around to get ideas and inspirations. But one of the things that I've always I I think is fun is the combination of gardening and history, and oftentimes these gardens have historical components. So is that true for the gardens you visited?

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Well, you know, English gardens weren't known as English gardens way back when. They actually were um developed in the um 16 to 1700s. Before that they used to just be hedgerows and people would have their farm um and then they'd have their livestock separated. Um but it wasn't until uh people were getting more money and living in larger estates and going, gee, I really want to do something with them. And that's when the landscape architects and painters came into more prominence. And so the people that had the money said, I want to do something with the property around my house. And so that's when the original William Kent was the original person who came up with the idea of an English garden, and those were formal gardens, and we're gonna talk about the differences between a formal and uh cottage garden because that came later. But uh originally they were very structured, had hedges, and it was more for people that owned like hundreds of acres of property and they were so estates. Yeah, big estates, and those were the ones that first originally started doing some type of organized gardening, and that's when English gardening started. But after that, after the 1700s, then um some of the other people, um Charles Bridgman, for example, said, you know, I really want to have more of an informal garden, some more of a cottage, and that's where cottage gardenings came from. For people who, you know, maybe didn't have a huge estate, but they really like to have flowers and they like the idea of having gardens. And so the smaller, more intimate gardens, so the cottage gardens were formed then.

SPEAKER_02 4:42

So the gardening, the English gardens had their roots in aristocracy, in the the rich folks on the big estates, and then it worked its way down and evolved into different kinds of English gardens, including the cottage garden that we're gonna talk more about.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

And not only that, of course, the the aristocracy back then traveled a lot. And so um it was interesting when I was doing some of my research that you know from different countries people would come and get ideas, and they of course traded a lot of plants and trees, and that was how a lot of uh horticulture got started. But the interesting thing is the best known English garden in Europe is not in England.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

Oh, come on.

SPEAKER_01 5:25

Yeah, it's in Munich, Germany, really. Seriously. Yeah. So um you can tell that people did travel then, and so and they have an English garden in Germany.

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Well, the formal traditional English gardens with straight lines and things orderly, I guess that does fit the the German cultural aesthetic as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Well, yes, and you know, they were very well traveled back then, and so they not only brought in uh things from the English gardens, but they would bring in uh Roman um ideas, Chinese pavilion type things, and they wherever their travels were uh um they would bring them in and kind of remind them of where they traveled, and they just brought them back to their own gardens.

SPEAKER_02 6:08

And so we're obviously not aristocrats as master gardeners, but we travel too, and we travel more as retirees, but we've tr everybody travels to a certain extent, whether it's a weekend or a day trip. But this idea of being uh of visiting gardens and being inspired, this is part of what you learned from the trip too, that this isn't new, that people have been doing this for a really long time.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

Yeah, and you know, the 20th century is definitely when the cottage gardens started, and we that's why I like to travel, is I got to pick up some ideas and I'm bringing them home and going to share with everybody here too.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

So let's um let's take it down a level now and let's talk about the specifics of what are the elements of an English garden.

SPEAKER_01 6:52

Okay, because there are two different kinds of English gardens. There's the formal and then there's the kind.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

So should we start with the formal?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Yep, let's start with that. Okay, so usually they're planted with carefully planted short hedges and and they call them haas. Ha ha ha. Like ha ha ha ha. Yes. And the reason they they're short is because they still wanted to be able to keep the animals out from coming onto their property, but they wanted to be able to see the nature um over the hedges. So they always put haas around. And those were like what we put a small garden gate or a garden fence, they would actually use hedges.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

So these weren't gardens in the center of London. These were more gardens on the uh the the uh the outlying areas that that came up against uh open space that included farms and and uh or they could have been, you know, the cottages on the estates.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

If for those of you that remember Downton Abbey, they had people that lived on the estate and they had houses on the estates, and they still to this day have that same um aspect of uh community. The people that live in some of the towns are actually tenant owners. They work the landowner owns all the property, owns the houses, and they rent and help still maintain the property. And so those people don't have the big formal gardens, but they have a lot of the um smaller gardens which you know incorporates uh your the formal ones would have the kitchen garden and the formal landscape and the raised flower beds and um maybe a little you know barn for the cattle and stuff like that. But in the more traditional ones that we're used to, uh they didn't have all that structure there. But they all have the same things in common, and that would be your perennials, your annuals, their herbs, your roses, shrubs, and grass.

SPEAKER_02 8:49

So these are the the colors of the palette they used to paint the formal English garden.

SPEAKER_01 8:54

And it's really fun because it doesn't, you know, the we have different gardens here. We have different seasons. So you're gonna want to put perennials in, and you're gonna want to put annuals in, and even winter annuals, which we don't always think of as being a long-term plant, but it brings that flowering element into your garden that you really need to have for a year-round flowering gardens where the perennials are fine and they come up every year, but the annuals are the really hard workers and the ones that really, you know, keep the color going.

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Yeah, did you see some perennials that were that you knew what the plants were? Were is it all different kinds of plants?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

I know. I thought for sure I was gonna see a whole bunch of things I didn't know what they were, and um even though I'm here coming from Michigan, and there were a lot of plants here in California I didn't know what they were, but when we went uh to England, a lot of course those plants were imported into the United States. So there weren't very many that I saw that I couldn't identify. So that was really an interesting thing for me. They had uh a lot of flocks and hibiscus and hydrangea and lupin and veronica, and of course they had tulips too, um, which we can't really grow here very well. But um they had it they had a wide variety of different kinds of perennials and and they were all ones I could recognize. It was great.

SPEAKER_02 10:17

And the annuals?

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Annuals, same kind of thing. Um the ones that that I like to plant right now because it is colder weather are pansies and cosmos and snapdragons are wonderful. So in the wintertime, this is a really good plant to put in. In the English gardens, when we were there in May, the tulips were just dying, and they so that some of them we just saw the tail end of. But of course, now they were going to replace those. They were gonna let them go die back and then replant those gardens. And in the formal gardens where they had hedges around all the specific kind of gardens, you could see, okay, we have the purple, this whole bed of purple tulips, and now they're going to put in another type of plant in this area. Maybe it was a triangle, maybe it was a rectangle, but they were all different. But they also incorporated um vegetables in with their regular flower gardens.

SPEAKER_02 11:08

Well, really. So they don't have they don't necessarily have separate vegetable beds, they they work them together.

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Well the the nice thing is they're using vegetables as a flower or as uh So they foliage the Yes, yeah. And they do have regular uh vegetable gardens and they're because they're actually planting food for their house and for their guests. But mingled in like chard is a real good example, the colors of chards are just gorgeous. And so they were mixing those in as uh foliage treatment to accent the flowers that they had.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

And I know during the Master Gardener training, a number of the speakers that we had talked about incorporating edibles to perform some of the landscape functions. You know, and we had I remember uh the guy that talked about citrus said, you know, your perennial hedges, rather than you know, relying on Escalonia or Ficus or something like that, to actually use uh different types of citrus to create the same benefits, the same landscape purposes of evergreen hedges, but instead also be able to get a food value out of it.

SPEAKER_01 12:18

And I did see some, you know, it looked like a raised up hedge because they had trees planted right next to each other, and these were all fruit trees, and they were flat.

SPEAKER_02 12:29

Oh, so they hedged them.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

They uh they used hedgers almost to They made the trees look like a raised up hedge. So you had a big long walkway, you saw the trunks, and then you saw all this big green wall of fruit tree.

SPEAKER_02 12:45

And so in Orange County, I think Orange County is famous for the ornamental landscape with almost no food values, and this idea, maybe not converting your whole yard to edibles, but you know, taking this design element that you saw in the English landscapes to to bring this in. You could have either informal, soft, unhedged, or formal hedged, depending on what look you're looking for in the garden.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

And then one thing that would be remiss in an English garden is to not have roses. And of course, there were many, many types of roses and different um they would have walls, uh big stone walls that had been there for centuries covered with climbing roses or wisteria, just totally covered. Um, some of the buildings downtown when we'd go into a town would have wisteria that were just in full bloom, second story high. I mean, it we don't see it here because we just don't have buildings that old where people have put that on. But um there and of course roses are there are a lot of rose uh producers and growers in England and so they're very well known for the roses.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

So climbing roses, the hybrid tea roses. Did you see the florabundas that are so popular here in County?

SPEAKER_01 14:01

They oh, they had everything there. They had all the different kinds of roses. I mean they would typically in the formal gardens they would have one of their rooms as a rose room. And it's real interesting when you remember the old mazes that you would walk through. Well, they actually have hedges that are over nine feet tall. And you'll walk into a hedge, they'll have a doorway built right into the hedge. Actually, not built, it's just carved out of the hedge. You walk in and you're walking into a room now, into the formal garden, and this might be the rose garden. So they may have little hedges around each of the different types of uh colors of roses, and of course they're all color coordinated and um very well kept because they have the gardeners.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

So we'll get more into the rooms in a second, but I want to finish up on the roses. Were you struck by in terms of colors and types of roses being the same amount of variety as what you see in Orange County, or is it more variety?

SPEAKER_01 15:02

Oh yes, no. Matter of fact, because a lot of the roses that were introduced in England, they make their way here. And so the Rosarians develop new and better roses and then they bring them here, and so our large rose companies um will actually produce all of these. They graft them onto root stock here, and then we have them here.

SPEAKER_02 15:23

So you can't bring any live plant material back. There's strict agricultural quarantine requirements with USDA, but but the growers are in fact um uh going through the required importation process to be able to make these available. So you saw it's it seemed familiar, the roses seem familiar to you?

SPEAKER_01 15:43

Yes, and you know that that's the thing. We're talking about travel, and you can bet that people who are interested in a certain type of plant are traveling around the world to find a better plant. So those rose people are out there too, and they're going to England and they're going to other countries and looking and at other gardens and seeing which varieties uh work well and then they bring them back to us.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

And then finishing up the elements of the English garden, uh the shrubs that you saw.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Mm-hmm. Oh yeah, there were always and usually they were flowering shrubs so that they actually would bloom at a certain time of the year.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

So it's not all privet hedge, which is just, you know, it's not.

SPEAKER_01 16:20

No, no, and the great part about that is when they're not blooming, then it leaves uh a place for your eye to rest. You know, you've got a lot of people.

SPEAKER_02 16:29

It provides a background to accentuate your annuals, your colors. Yeah. And then turf. What's going on? It's uh uh in terms of uh UK, England, uh further north, generally wetter than we are. Are they having drought con concerns? Are you are they replacing turf or is that still a an important part of the English garden?

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Not so much. Um there they do have they have a lot of grass. They they still because they have livestock, they have big open fields where they actually graze. You can look out at when you're in the home in the garden, you can see the animals grazing on the grass. They also use grass as a fundamental design aspect in the formal gardens where you will walk in and they will have stepping stones down the center, you know, maybe two feet apart. Um, so your eye follows that, but that's how you get through the garden. But everything else is surrounded with grass and then the hedges and then the flowers would be in the hedges.

SPEAKER_02 17:25

So the design element for English gardens of grass probably adapted for us here in Orange County would be maybe accents of lawn and turf, but maybe maybe less grass, less turf than what you saw in English.

SPEAKER_01 17:38

Yeah, that it uh grass for us we really like for our play areas for the kids, and it also makes um a nice uh separate area in to enhance your garden.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

And I think that gets back to the purpose, you know, why do you have different aspects, different parts of your gardens? What is it accomplishing? Is it providing food? Is it providing uh visual um uh respite, or is it uh has have a useful aspect for for dogs and for kids? So let's now talk about shapes of English gardens.

SPEAKER_01 18:11

Well, the f there are um a lot of shapes for gardens, and typically in the more traditional formal gardens, those have the straight lines, so it would always be rectangular rooms or and in those rooms they'll have triangular hedges with flowers inside the hedges, uh the triangles that the hedges make. Um so those were straight line tends to make it look more formal. They would also do raised beds, so maybe they would have um blocks of stones were an area where they made a raised bed in a certain area, but everything in there would be more formal. They would have a color palette in there, um, not uh you know a cacophony of color, it would just be like these are um maybe the yellows and the purples are together.

SPEAKER_02 19:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 19:01

So that that would be the more formal ones.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

So formal would be straight lines, more angular, and again, we're not recommending to our listeners here in Orange County that they install an English garden, but again, so the design element that could be considered is if your hardscaping has lots of straight lines, then playing off of that and including a straight line plant feature might actually make sense, and this would be of course based inspired by an English landscape.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Yeah, and um that some of the characteristics of a more formal garden, especially back in the old estates, they would usually have a lake, they would have rolling lawns, so um this would be, you know, we don't have rolling lawns, but they would have mounds, uh little areas where they would have plantings, and that would be something you could do in your own backyard instead of having a giant rolling lawn, you could have a raised area. Maybe you want to highlight a tree in a certain spot and you want to raise up that and put some things you could.

SPEAKER_02 20:03

So instead of having a flat rectangular piece of lawn in your yard, the design element from the English gardens that you saw would be to add mounds or add some elevational feature to make it more interesting. Yeah. And maybe we can't have a lake in our backyard, but we still can have a water feature.

SPEAKER_01 20:20

Oh yeah. I mean that that's one of the things you can bring back with you, you know, just if even if it's just a little waterfall or just to hear that water is so pleasant to have. And then um also they would have groves of trees. We can still do that here in Orange County. I was taking some uh specialty classing uh classes on pruning and grafting, and we found that uh for your home fruit tree orchard, um you don't have to have them more than you can prune them to six feet tall. Actually, for the home gardener, a tree that you can pick your fruit in is what without a ladder is what your goal is.

SPEAKER_02 20:59

Right.

SPEAKER_01 20:59

So you can have those uh groves of trees. I have a very small backyard, but I can put three fruit trees in it because I am going to prune them to be able to fit my yard.

SPEAKER_02 21:09

So when we talk about a grove, we're not thinking about you know hundreds of trees, we're thinking about two or three or four or five trees, but grouping them to create the the design element, the uh the feeling of a of a larger tree growth.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

Well, and besides that, how many oranges can you eat? I mean, if you have an orange tree, I know you're probably giving some away. And so they would have large orchards, and of course they would, you know, do jams and jellies and things like that to preserve all of their fruit. Well, we don't really have to do that. And you can like I'm going to plant three avocado trees that bloom in three different times in my garden, so I can have avocados all year round.

SPEAKER_02 21:48

So you can have an an extended season of fruit production without producing so much fruit at one time that you end up wasting it. Or worse you become a pariah in your neighborhood. neighborhood if they see you if they see you coming down the street with a bag of fruit.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Oh, here's Ellie again with those avocados.

SPEAKER_02 22:08

Avocados are pretty easy to sell, but you know, cumquats, lemons, um zucchini, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_01 22:18

But so you can have your own grove in your in your backyard. You don't have to have a huge big sprawling thing. Another thing that they have are sculptures and because they traveled a lot and people visited a lot of times they would bring things from their country, uh garden items um or ideas. Sometimes there would be uh you know they would bring their sculptures or a bust or whatever it was from their country and so instead of us having big sculptures in our backyard and I know some people do have them. It's it's nice especially if you have a pond or something and you just put a crane in it or something. But I have those real small little critters made out of uh metal and I just ones that kind of rust into a natural yeah and some are painted and then they have a nice patina on them and it's kind of brings a little whimsy to the garden and it's kind of more gives you your garden personality.

SPEAKER_02 23:10

I mean we do our version of garden sculptures bird houses and so yeah one of the one of our family trips we bought you know unpainted bird houses and bought a bunch of paint and everybody in our family young to old we basically got a birdhouse that we got to decorate and then they installed those in the backyard. So it's a fun thing to do as an activity but then when you know when the grandkids come over especially they see their birdhouse and that's kind of a nice way to get them interested and out in the garden.

SPEAKER_01 23:40

Well and you get birds.

SPEAKER_02 23:42

Yeah and you do get birds and so there's another benefit to that.

SPEAKER_01 23:45

Yeah that's great. You talked about haha tell me more about haha well um the haha's uh were just um established so that the farm animals are not necessarily just farm animals like we have things to keep coyotes out. Well they just didn't want the farm animals trampling through all their gardens coming up to the house.

SPEAKER_02 24:05

The haha is a type of wall?

SPEAKER_01 24:07

Yep it's um they're just a small short and it can be a hedge it could be a a bunch of bushes that are that make a hedge and it's just so that the animals won't come into the garden. And they just called them I'm not sure why but that's what they call them. How funny and then there's also grottoes and the grottos originally in the formal former gardens were used as romantic hideouts. So of course yeah the estates were quite large and pretty formal and so if you wanted to have a rendezvous they would have these they were man-made and they were supposed to resemble um natural caves. Of course you have ruling lands there's not always a lot of cave material but they would they would make kind of like hidden gardens and places where you could meet discreetly and um but I did see some real interesting things when you had a hedge they actually built a garado into the hedge so they would have a focal point. Maybe it was a sculpture or maybe it was a window. Sometimes they had windows built right into the hedge not with wood but just cut out. Right and it showed into the next garden some focal point that they wanted you to see while you were in this garden room. It was really fun.

SPEAKER_02 25:20

So garden room so let's talk more about garden rooms so kind of start broad the concept of garden rooms.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Well when I moved here from Michigan I had a much smaller uh garden space and mine uh butts a canyon go uh with a hill behind it.

SPEAKER_02 25:38

Right so you've got some open space adjacent your property.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Right but there's a nice fence there so I won't get any uh critters coming in. But the problem was it was a huge big rectangle and it was your yard your yard's a big rectangle. When I first moved in it was all grass. Right and then it was a little raised uh area and then I had three feet of flower garden up to the fence. Right and uh and then there was a cement slab next to the house and I looked at that and I thought oh my gosh what am I going to do with all this grass? It's just it's too much too much. So what I wound up doing is I wound up building a wall in the center of from my house, perpendicular to my house and separated those two areas in half. So now on the right hand side when I walk out of my dining room I have the wall with my barbecue on it and a place for buffets or you know that's a potluck area I can have out there. So now I have a kitchen that I can cook outside and then we put a deck um with a pergola over the top and I put my um outside dining room.

SPEAKER_02 26:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 26:52

So I have now I have a kitchen dining room an outside room for that and then next to then on the right hand side are is my little formal garden and that's is going to have my orchard in there. I haven't gotten all my plants involved yet but um that part is going to be when I sit in my dining room I can look out into my uh intimate garden my more formal garden on the right hand side. Now as I go on to the other side of the wall which I can get to from my uh deck I have my I call my Garden of Eden. This is my more informal flower garden. Right. This is when I come out of the bedroom in the morning and I just want to sip my coffee and enjoy I have a my rose garden is there and I have other plants and different you know uh heights and flowering stages and that's just a fun garden for me to look at and enjoy all the colors and not so formal, very much more um eclectic and um I even have a little river of rocks growing in there with some succulents along there. So that that's my more fun area. So I was able to change my big rectangular backyard that I inherited into little houses, little spaces where I could little rooms.

SPEAKER_02 28:13

Yeah outdoor rooms outdoor rooms with different purposes and it was perfect.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

So you got your kitchen your dining and then you've got your uh your retreat yes yes and my got my house isn't huge and so that just extends my living space.

SPEAKER_02 28:27

Cool this is the in the garden show produced by UC Master Gardeners of Orange County. I'm Chris Bonner your host for the hour for more home garden information go online or search OC Master Gardener and select the link to the UC Master Gardener program. You'll find out about weeds, pests, ornamental plants and edibles this week's topic is lessons learned from English gardens. My guest is Sally Richards in Orange County Master Gardener. Now let's return for interview with Sally So Sally we were just talking about rooms outside. Now you saw this uh was this a per predominant feature to see rooms in English gardens?

SPEAKER_01 29:07

Well when we were visiting the estates they definitely were more of the formal everything was pretty formal there and we saw a lot of that however we did see the the Royal gardens and um Charles home and we were able to go there and have high teeth but um he just happened to not be there and we went. But the thing his whole philosophy is he really likes the prairie look. He wants to go back to the natural grasslands and so they actually did have more of a prairie not so much of regular grass like we think of so not e not either formal English or cottage English but something altogether different? Yes yes so he had uh wherever he could put in that he actually planted prairie uh flowers and naturally occurring things kind of like our native plants here we're trying to put in native things that grow well here.

SPEAKER_02 30:02

For a different ecosystem.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Yes and that's what he was doing in England.

SPEAKER_02 30:06

So the more sustainable so probably less labor, less fertilizer, less everything you make the investment to put these in and then just kind of let nature support them.

SPEAKER_01 30:17

Yes and you know the the weeds that we call weeds you know uh uh still flower and you know go to seed and form more different uh flower areas mixed in with all the other types of flowers that that were in that it was really pretty beautiful.

SPEAKER_02 30:33

And so transitions between rooms so we uh one of the things I think you mentioned earlier was pathways.

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Yes and they'd used all kinds of pathways they didn't they weren't all just you know a a tile every twelve feet they had cobblestone they had brick the consistent thing is and we'll talk about architecture and and planning your garden is if they put in cobblestones they would have cobblestones all the way through it and and maybe um some what we call DG which is right gr uh granite.

SPEAKER_02 31:09

Which is a common element here in Orange County now. Oh yeah I'm I'm using it especially for my succulents and cactus so less runoff more percolation in the garden it's good good for the yard good for the environment.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Yep and good for our water. So they would use uh different types of pathways to guide you to some quiet area or they would have a garden that would that would tee and then you'd go, whoa I have to go one way or the other and they would have a path that leads you in the direction they want you to go. Maybe it's to a quiet seating area. I'm gonna do that in my backyard too in my more formal area is uh make a little path and then put a little seating thing so that my path actually goes to my seat. And it walks around all of my plants so they can enjoy them on the way to their seating area.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

So the pathways are functional but they're also a design element that adds you know visual interest to the art.

SPEAKER_01 32:09

Yeah and and they and they really like these they wanted to lead you to another place. They didn't want you to just walk through the whole thing. They wanted to have little mysterious places or especially like the windows in the hedge which were unexpected and um they put a lot of thought especially into the formal gardens.

SPEAKER_02 32:27

I had a landscape architect design my yard um boy it's about eight years ago when we redid our yard and he included some things I didn't appreciate but but a couple of things um that he did a really good job on this concept of rooms. We've got a dining room with a built-in barbecue we've got a living room which has got some outdoor furniture in a fireplace we've got a small spa or spool small pool, large spa, spool um but one of the things tying into this pathway thing is um there's kind of a utilitarian space behind the fireplace that I use just for stuff. And he created a little pathway which creates kind of this kind of interesting it's like oh there's a path that goes to a secret spa. Surprise yeah it's kind of a surprise it people don't even go there but somehow that does evoke something make people feel good about when they go out well and it's a nice little secret that we have you know a s little secret spot that you know not everybody knows about it's kind of fun.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

That's why I like having like little surprises of maybe little sculptures around or I have a couple of those metal flowers that are about four feet tall and I I've taken pictures of those and sent them to my friends that said, you know, I use a special fertilizer for this flower, you know, to get this to get this flower to grow but it's actually metal. And so I like having the fun element and the surprise element in my garden along with all the natural things too.

SPEAKER_02 33:53

We've talked a lot about the formal English gardens.

SPEAKER_01 33:55

What about the cottage gardens give us a little bit of an overview on the cottage well the cottage gardens obviously totally different they they use more curvy lines and uh a lot of color so they'll have um and all different sizes. They don't just go okay now we have to have the short ones in the uh front and then the mediums and then the talls they will actually put tall total tall it's a total tall garden and then it kind of flops over onto the pathway. So it's not as restricted or formal it's uh you know and the perennials are in there, the annuals are in there.

SPEAKER_02 34:29

So the formal is more rule based but the cottages just you do different stuff and kind of let it happen?

SPEAKER_01 34:35

Well they actually do plan out the cottage gardens also and mostly they do it by color. So they want to make sure that it's not going to be you know uh b weird looking things going together. So they usually use a color family like maybe this will be their pinks, reds and purple area. One of the things about the um cottage yeah the cottage gardens is they don't have a whole garden totally full of all different colored plants. They usually have a resting space for your eye. So when you have a big group of all these different kinds of plants then they'll have some greenery next to it so that it kind of gives your eye a break from having all of this color and then your eye rests and then they go to another area where they'll have more color.

SPEAKER_02 35:25

So the idea of having too much color creates kind of visual chaos and the idea of having a palette of different textures and colors of green and then that really makes the colored flowers pop. Yeah it makes you appreciate that instead of it all kind of blurring together special when it's if it was all color it wouldn't be special and it wouldn't be as interesting and fun to look at.

SPEAKER_01 35:48

Yes and and that's one of the things about the English garden it looks like it's just a whole bunch of um messy flowers all over but actually those are pretty well thought out and color coordinated so that was always an interesting thing that I found out and they use a lot of wisteria there in England. It grows really well and it's perfect because it can go right on the walls. Don't have to think of your garden stopping at the house now you can um have your wisteria growing up the walls or maybe a climbing roses for the cottage garden.

SPEAKER_02 36:21

Yeah you mentioned your little secret area that included seating so um I understand that seating is an important um design element in English gardens.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Yes well you know uh even in my garden which is just my backyard on my path which uh goes around to the quiet garden I have like a half circle rose garden and I have um and I have I have a rule on that they all have to smell good that's my rule they don't come in my garden I don't have that much space so I have to be particular so I have a bench right across from that. So the path goes by the garden but I have a bench so I can sit there and then I can enjoy it or I can you know cut a couple and just enjoy the fragrance of the roses and just be able to have a place to rest and enjoy it.

SPEAKER_02 37:08

So being a gardener isn't just all technology and research and facts and figures. It's also getting to know your garden and just like a relationship with the person you get to know um people and things by spending time with them. So this idea of creating seating areas in the garden gives you a chance to experience to be with your garden to get to know it and kind of see stuff that's going on that if you're just out there taking care of business you might miss some of this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

And my husband has an interesting philosophy he's not he's just sort of getting into gardening and he's really not into it as much as I am and he goes well everything you plant has to grow or you're not doing something right.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

Or it has to be the right size fully mature size right now and and they don't die. Your plants don't die and I said oh yes they do I I garden by whatever is a good enough plant to live in my garden gets to stay and the ones that died will try something different.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

That's right it wasn't meant to be there and so when you're spending your time in the garden whether you're just pulling on occasional weed that that happened to come up that didn't belong there or you're sitting there and really enjoying your roses you start seeing things in there that maybe didn't belong and I you know if you just were walking by you might not have noticed it. And or maybe something that just started to grow and you go, well how did that get there? Boy that looks pretty nice.

SPEAKER_02 38:32

Yeah. So those are things that you notice the other thing you see is the different vistas and views and even if well most of us don't have view lots but but the idea of um sight lines you know and being able to take advantage of sight lines beyond your garden. You back up against open space um I do too but many people don't but this idea of adding um trees and shrubs to block unsightly things, you know whether it's power lines or a massive wall of a neighbor's house but on the other hand not shedding off the views you have and whether it's open space or even into your neighbor's garden and taking advantage of what you're adjacent to.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Especially if they have a nice flowering tree you want to enjoy that too.

SPEAKER_02 39:16

So it sounds like this was an important aspect a lot of the English gardens was that the garden um the sidelines actually take you beyond the the confines of the of the garden itself.

SPEAKER_01 39:27

And especially in the formal ones they would go on and then you'd walk into another room and they'd all be linear so you'd know there's another room after this room but there's something else going on. Maybe they had a pond in there maybe they had a fountain in that room as their focal point. One of the things that I'm doing here in Orange County is our property backs up to a hill and they have bushes on the hill and it's it's uh broom I think it's a broom flower or broom I don't know what the sh shrub name is but anyway it has a yellow flower on it and it's but I have a fence, a white fence. And so basically what I want to do now is I've got Boganville growing on that and basically I want to cover my fence with that so that it looks like my garden continues on up the hill into the yellow bushes um so that they don't see it. But now my neighbor she has those glass panels and her property looks down into the canyon.

SPEAKER_02 40:23

Right.

SPEAKER_01 40:24

So she actually has a whole different view and is able to block off um you know critters and things from coming in her garden but she can still see visually she keeps it open.

SPEAKER_02 40:33

I have a friend and he um used another way to extend his yard into an open space and there were some um some sycamores on the open space property behind him and what he did is he added some lights on the top of the wall that illuminated the trees that weren't his trees. Well so then at night when these lights come on it gives you the impression that he is on an estate that his property goes further. So you can use tricks you know with um you know with clear panels with hedges with lighting to block or to open up and accentuate and to um really just you know redefining what a view is a view isn't just you know a view of the ocean or the coast or the white water but a view is just something beyond your yard.

SPEAKER_01 41:22

And a lot of our yards aren't really big in some areas and so all the better. It just makes it look like we have more outdoor space than we actually do.

SPEAKER_02 41:32

So some of the do's and don'ts and again we have here do's and don'ts in planning your English garden but but these do's and don'ts apply to our anybody's garden too so um so take us through a few of those of the do's Sally Okay um the nice thing is uh these are all things that we can do here and um whether you have an English garden or not.

SPEAKER_01 41:52

Right but you're gonna bring it a touch of England back a touch of England. Yes and so um like I'm doing I'm making uh walls and I'm making walled rooms so you can do that with yours too. You don't have to actually put up a wall you could just put a hedge up and make this into a special area. When you're going to do a garden and this is true of just any type of landscaping is you want to emulate what your home materials are. So say you have a stone on the outside maybe you have a stone fireplace or something on the outside you'd it's good to bring those materials into your garden and incorporate the stones as part of your hardscape.

SPEAKER_02 42:31

Rather than doing something completely different.

SPEAKER_01 42:33

Yes um like I've got stucco which a lot of people do and I happen to have a little one foot wall and it happens to be stucco and then I have brick on the top of that for uh to seal it and so my paths are brick. And so I've incorporated the stucco from the house and then brick. So you're not you're not going to put in brick and stucco and wood and all these different things which are really visually confusing. Bring in the things that will incorporate your house into the garden so it looks like it all is supposed to go together.

SPEAKER_02 43:03

So uh a more limited palette or consistency in your hardscape materials so that it looks like it goes together. So the kind of the do-it-yourself is you know what's on sale at big box store today and you add that in and you keep doing that and suddenly you've got this mishmash and so kind of a simple thing to do is less is more just kind of take what you've got that you've already got the investment in and just build off of that.

SPEAKER_01 43:28

Yeah and then it really lets your plants uh bloom I mean really highlights the plants instead of the hardscape.

SPEAKER_02 43:35

Right. So hedges and walls to create rooms and again not physical rooms but spaces that have different purposes and a purpose might be a respite area, it might be um for edibles, it might be for entertaining, for dining, for cooking on a barbecue. Mm-hmm. Um what uh let's see so we talked about emulating the home materials this Concept of you know what do you plant and how that plays out over the year? Let's talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 44:06

Well, you know, the backbone of most gardens are your perennials. Those you're and you can count on those coming up um every year at a certain time of the year and they bloom. But the the hard workers for your garden are really your annuals. And so planting a lot of annuals will make your garden continue to have a blooming cycle all year round. So um, especially in the English gardens, they plant a lot of annuals. They have a lot of perennials, but the same thing here. If you go to the garden centers now, you'll see the winter annuals that are for sale now. You aren't going to see those in July because they're not gonna be growing, they're just not a good time. So, yeah, put in a lot of annuals.

SPEAKER_02 44:49

So plants that change during the year, whether it's um blooms or foliage, but this idea of there's always something going on, and something doesn't have to be massive, it doesn't have to be the whole yard, it can just be part of the yard. I mean, I've got some crepe myrtles like a lot of people do, you know, and that provides blooms in the you know a couple times of the year, but it also provides you know what what passes for fall colors here in Southern California, and some years, you know, if you could get a little bit of a cold snap like this year, just gorgeous reds, deep reds and oranges. Some years it's more muted, but you know, again, creating that color for part of the year, you know, it takes the mind off of the fact that I don't have a lot of annuals going on when the crepe myrtles are have a have a nice foliage crap.

SPEAKER_01 45:38

And it's a lot of color in one spot and you're looking up.

SPEAKER_02 45:41

Yeah, that's right. Provides a focus. Yeah. So um plants that change for the year, annuals. Talk about elevation uh in in the garden and what you what do you some does you learn from the English gardens?

SPEAKER_01 45:53

Well, you know, they do do raise beds, and they don't all necessarily have to be on the outside of your yard, you know, like by the wall. You don't have to have a raised bed there. You can actually make uh as your path goes around something, you can make a mound and you can either put rocks around it to raise it up, depending on what your hardscape choice is. You can actually make rounded areas or I had a kidney shaped uh area in Michigan and that raised the plants up. So I either had a sitting area depending on how high your uh raised area is, um, and that's really handy when you're weeding, you can just sit down on that and and then plant things up to give it a different focal point than just having everything going to the outside of your garden.

SPEAKER_02 46:40

So just as there's do's, there's don'ts. So let's what are some don'ts that you picked up on this trip to England?

SPEAKER_01 46:48

So of course in the formal gardens we found that you know it's the straight lines, it's the rectangles, it's the uh triangles, hexagons, anything with a straight line leads to a more formal look. And then in the cottage gardens, they would have more curvy lines. So maybe coming from your doorway, you'd have an uh, you know, an arch oval or circle coming away from your doorway. And then you don't want to use mixed flowers in every bed, and we talked about that. We'd let it be.

SPEAKER_02 47:17

I think this is this is a good one. So whether it's an English garden or not, but the idea of having straight lines or curvy lines. And again, just like we talked about building materials and tying into the house, if you mix it, it creates it it it doesn't make it doesn't have the same feel as when you've got consistency of lines. Right. So so the advice here would be don't mix lots of straight lines with lots of curvy lines. Pick what you're gonna go with. And again, you are gonna have things that have straight lines like the driveway, but then you can add a curvy element of inset stones or uh paver materials to create a curve. So you can create add curves to some of the straight line features if you're looking for that less formal. If you're looking for a more formal look, stay away from the curviness. Maybe some circles work, but basically stay with the geometric shapes.

SPEAKER_01 48:13

Yeah, and one of the things I'm doing, because I do have my rectangular concrete uh sidewalk just before I get into my garden and I want it to be more informal, I'm gonna take bricks and make uh kind of an alcove, but it's gonna be a half circle from my concrete so that I can plant either a small tree or some type of a highlighted thing there so it breaks up that straight line of the cement there. Got it. And um then I'll then I'll have space on the other side in my garden to plant other plants.

SPEAKER_02 48:46

Now you started to talk about mixing flowers interrupted. You said go ahead with that thought now.

SPEAKER_01 48:50

Well, you know, if we talked about this a little earlier about having all of the different colors and too much n color just doesn't let your eye rest, doesn't let you be calm, planting things in where you've got different heights or maybe all the same height, but flopping over, especially in your um uh garden, um cottage garden. Right. But uh you need to have that break, and it can be either a seeding area or you can have uh greenery there, and a lot of times greenery doesn't have to be green either. Um, you know, there's when your roses start to come out, you always get those red uh Right, the the the fresh growth. Right, and so but it they're not flowering, there's no color there, there's just the green and the reds. And there are a lot of plants, especially this time of year, when it starts to get cold, they do start to turn red and and get different colors. So it'll br it you don't just have to have like a a hedge type of thing, but you know, even the hydrangeas only bloom at a certain time of the year, and so when they're not blooming, they have beautiful uh big leaves on them, and it's right. It's really nice.

SPEAKER_02 49:58

So in the flower beds don't mix the flowers but try to create an impact of a certain color. I think you know people don't think of Disneyland as being, you know, formal gardens, but if you really look at it, again, they're not cottage gardens, they are more formal gardens, and one of the things that they do very effectively is when they do a bed, they do a color and it creates this huge splash of the same color. And yeah, I do this on a small scale in my own garden where you know uh my front my front flowering bed, I seasonally switch that out. I tend to go towards the pinks, but you know, in Christmas time I'll put out whites, but but I'll put in all the same color flowers rather than mixing it up because it creates uh visually a bigger impact when you uh don't mix and match the colors together in the same bed.

SPEAKER_01 50:49

Yeah, and and they do a great job with topiaries too.

SPEAKER_02 50:54

So focal points, what's a focal point?

SPEAKER_01 50:57

Okay, so uh focal point could be uh birdbath. Okay. Um it could be a a small fountain. Maybe you have a little fountain.

SPEAKER_02 51:07

So what's the don't here?

SPEAKER_01 51:09

Okay, so um if you have too many, so okay, yes, you like birds, and I have a birdbath in here, and I'm gonna put a fountain nearby because I think the birds would like to have that fountain. And then um I have a couple of statues that I'd like to put in there too, but maybe I only have like a six by six foot space, but I I really like these, or I picked up this and uh somebody gave me this, and then pretty soon it gets to be very cluttered, and you don't really get to enjoy it. So you don't it's better to choose one or two things to concentrate to focus on.

SPEAKER_02 51:42

It's more meaningful, it's more visually interesting, it's better designed if your garden doesn't look cluttered with focal points.

SPEAKER_01 51:49

Yes, and um it I mean it's fun to have whimsy and surprise, but when you're sitting there and pretty soon you start collecting and collecting, and then you have way too much going on, and then you lose the whole point of a garden is you really want to enjoy the flowers.

SPEAKER_02 52:04

Let's finish up on seeding. We talked about seeding earlier. So give um our listeners some ideas and perspectives about seeding that you got from your trip.

SPEAKER_01 52:14

Well, the nice thing was they were like surprise seating, like they had the path and it it didn't go anywhere except to this seating area. So you were walking through this garden and all of a sudden the path goes off to the left and you don't see it because maybe there's a hedge there, and then all of a sudden you come on this little bench and it's got flowers around it, or maybe there's an arbor over the bench where you can enjoy the climbing roses. It just is a nice little place for you to stop and reflect, and it doesn't have to be. I mean, I have a little aluminum chair that I have that's a a really nice aluminum chair that I have outside, and a little table. That's my seating area when I just want to sit in my garden.

SPEAKER_02 52:58

So this doesn't have to be hard scape expensive complex when we're talking about seating areas.

SPEAKER_01 53:04

Yeah, and um, and then on my in my rose garden across from that, I just have a flat old wooden bench that I found and um somebody it was recycled, and I I said, Wow, that'll be perfect because it's just wood and it it's not ornate, it's not anything, it's just a place to sit.

SPEAKER_02 53:21

So seating is something that almost everybody can add to the garden to add visual interest, to add enjoyment, and to be able just to be out in your garden and enjoy it more.

SPEAKER_01 53:30

And it when you're in your garden too, walk to a different part of your garden. Like I have a large area where I can walk into it, and right now I have it kind of looking as a an overview of a field with a lot of ground cover, and granted this isn't very big, but when I walk to the back of the garden and I look back, it's a completely different view than when I'm standing on my cement slab looking at my garden. And so it's nice to have those little walkways with us, little scening area in a surprise area to give you a different perspective on your garden.

SPEAKER_02 54:03

So the lessons learned in terms of all the things we've talked about, but another lesson learned, not specific to your trip, but just in general, is the idea of building into your travels, you know, whether it's day trips here in Southern California or more distant trips to other parts of California or even to the world, is to look for these gardens, look for these tours, look for these garden shows to get uh fun, interesting, inspirational ideas that you can bring back to your garden.

SPEAKER_01 54:31

And and that's exactly what I did. There were just so many different things that I saw and was able to bring them back here to Southern California. It was it was a wonderful trip.

SPEAKER_02 54:40

We've come to the close of our show in the garden. You've been listening to an interview with Sally Richards, an Orange County Master Gardener. Thank you, Sally, for sharing your knowledge and insights with us.

SPEAKER_01 54:49

Oh, thanks. This was fun, Chris.

SPEAKER_02 54:50

Yeah, it was. Remember, gardeners live longer, healthier, and happier lives. Thank you for listening to K U C I 88.9 FM in The Garden Show.