Layered Garden

Being away from the garden for a few weeks means I am closer to the books.  And access to the amazing RHS Lindley Library in London.  Which is like being let loose in a sweeet shop.

I diligently walked over there this week to return a book….. and had a quick browse on the New Books shelf.   And there was the one book I had read a review about a month ago and was dying to get my hands on.

Temptations. It was so gripping I couldn’t walk home, but had to catch a bus intead so I could devour the pages at once.

It is called The Layered Garden by David Culp and it is utterly absorbing.

What I have enjoyed most about the author is how honest he is about past mistakes.  Designs that went wrong, plants that died.  Plants in the wrong place. The time it takes to get things done. 

And the garden is twenty years in the making. And a lot of it done with his partner.  So I’m already envious.  Years of constant designing, help with all the work, and a consuming creative masterpiece.

The garden is in the US, in Pennsylvania.  And for once, it’s a garden that is almost like ours: cold winters, drought in summer and marauding deer.  He is mostly organic, doesn’t irrigate as he hasn’t the water supply, and has a lot of his garden in among trees.  It’s a far cry from all the gentle climate gardens I read about in Britain.

And his woodland planting is the most interesting area of his garden. Layers and layers of bulbs and herbaceous perennials, shrubs and trees.  I shall use it as a future inspiration when I get on with the tedious strimming of brambles in my woodland and fantasize about getting anything more exciting in the ground than narcissus bulbs.  And tulips, and repairing the damage created by the wild boar.