What’s in a Name?

Just when you think you’ve heard it all before, along comes a new buzzword that stops you in your tracks. Let’s start with the Blobbery.

The horticultural definition of a Blobbery is a landscape design featuring multiple topiary plants pruned into rounded, blob-like shapes, often arranged to create an undulating effect. Really? I thought that was cloud pruning. In fact, that is precisely what it is. But give it a new name and you reinvent it.

Small leaved plants lend themselves best to cloud pruning. In my client Gerri’s garden, pittosporum, abelia, berberis, choisia and euonymus are pruned into curved mounds at varying heights. Their different leaf colours and textures make for a very pleasing landscape. I created a Blobbery without even realising!

Another client, a very experienced gardener in her 90s, no longer able to leave her house, would instruct me from her French doors, very emphatically, not to shape her shrubs into domes.  Her mature garden, consisting of large leaved shrubs, such as philadelphus, viburnum and hypericum, had to look like they hadn’t been pruned, in a naturalistic, shaggy shape.  (A Shaggery? Maybe not.) What a learning curve that was. In order to create this branching habit, I had to dive deep into the shrub’s main stem and cut whole branches out at regular intervals from top to bottom, whilst also reducing the canopy at a gradient all the way round. Think Christmas tree. Success was moderate; choisia just doesn’t want to be shaggy.

Another new one on me is the Meanwhile Garden, an unused, brownfield site with no immediate development plans, which has been transformed into a community garden. Suddenly Meanwhile gardens are relevant, most notably The Beth Chatto Meanwhile Garden, Colchester’s newest community green space. And yet, this concept was conceived in 1976 by artist, engineer and visionary Jamie McCollough, who ‘transformed something derelict into something cherished’ on a disused, fenced off, council owned site in Paddington.  After much badgering, the council said that they might want to do something with the land in the future, but meanwhile, Jamie might as well go ahead.

And finally, Kew Gardens has just opened its Carbon Garden, an experimental project aimed at tackling climate change by selecting plants and hard landscaping that can withstand an unpredictable climate of draught and flash floods. Pretty much all the horticultural great and good have been creating dry gardens since Beth Chatto converted her old carpark into a dry garden in the 1970s. From Sissinghurst’s Delos Garden designed by Dan Pearson, to East Ruston Old Vicarage’s Desert Wash, this concept is by no means new, but all these gardens remain fresh.

So, does giving an established concept a new name, breathe new life into it? Yes, I think it does. If it makes you rethink and reexamine your ideas, you’ll always be learning and growing.

Love, Caroline x