Journal

Scampston Hall Gardens

I first visited the gardens at Scampston Hall soon after they had been laid out to the Piet Oudolf design - it must have been about 2006, when I was experimenting here with growing cut flowers that would give a similar effect in a vase or bouquet. I wanted to capture that rhythm of heights and textures, the inclusion of grasses and seed heads and things that you couldn't buy in a flower shop. I left with a notebook full of plant names - heneliums and sanguisorbas, eryngiums and scabious, lots and lots of grasses.

Though most of the photos that I have put in the gallery here are of flower combination that is actually a small part of the whole design.

The garden at Scampston is created within an C18th walled garden - it is made up of nine central spaces, divided by topiary hedges, and a perimeter walk of what are termed 'plantsman's plants'. There is a Renaissance inspired viewing mound, a topiary corridor, a formal woodland, wavy stripes of grass and a formal pond - but the bit I go for, and the bit that seems to be most popular with other camera laden visitors, is the four formally shaped beds around a fountain that make up the perennial garden.

Though the photos in the gallery were mainly taken within this relatively small area - the whole garden is 15,000 square metres but this area must only be 1/15 of that - they look as though they take up much more space. The very formal layout, the carefully placed chairs, the wide paths, are all subsumed in a feeling of flow and movement. It becomes all about shape and texture, veiled colours and the beauty of decay.

All of the insect life of the garden lives here. The things that I am taking with me as inspiration on this trip are going to be the low slung seating spaces deep within this tall planting - it was the perfect place for watching butterflies

The other thing that intrigues me is the maintenance - for though this may be a garden inspired by the way plants grow in nature it is not in any way a wild garden. The plants are unstaked yet stay upright there are no weeds, the edges are sharp, there is none of the soft collapse that happens here. Partly it is plant choice - Piet Oudolf has bred plants specifically for his designs, shorter, sturdier, making soft pillows of flowers or tall spires. I now have the amazing Cadbury's purple monarda "scorpion" on my wish list.

Mainly I think however it is a good and plentiful team of gardeners. Every inch of soil is close mulched with straw, every edge is clean and sharp, topiary and grass razor cut.

Do click the image to see the photos - you can click through one by one or choose to set them up as a slide show.

In the garden with Xanthe Gladstone

“I remember so vividly going out to our vegetable plot where I grew up in Scotland and eating carrots that we had just pulled out of the ground. I remember the taste so well, that sweet taste of a carrot that tastes like a completely different vegetable to the ones you buy in a supermarket ... Our vegetable garden didn’t last long because it was ravaged by deer and rabbits ... but it influenced the direction I decided to take my career.”

A few years later, Xanthe Gladstone, now 24, is back growing carrots in that same rabbit infested garden, dividing her time between Glen Dye in Kincardineshire, her family’s other home Hawarden in North Wales and London, combining growing vegetables with cooking and writing recipes. She is one of a new generation of young people recognising the ways in which the current system of industrial food production is not working, with the energy and borderline obsession to do something to change it. Just two years ago, newly graduated from Edinburgh University, Xanthe was following a much more conventional career path for a recent graduate - she was in an office job working on marketing for food and drinks companies.

Very quickly though she realised that being inside, sitting still and working at a desk were making her unhappy. She retreated home to rural Wales to rethink her career and then to Ireland to take the legendary Sustainable Food Course at Ballymaloe Cookery School. The course is taught by Darina Allen and a host of internationally acclaimed teachers - over six weeks it covers organic growing, climate change, food waste, nutrition, foraging - a modern, evidence based, food culture that harks back to traditional methods and skills. It is a course that fosters understanding of the link between the farm and the plate with an emphasis on sustainable growing and eating, a course that aims to reset the broken system of food production.

“By far the most important thing I have taken from the course is learning from the ferocious passion that the whole team of teachers bring to the school. Learning to question the system, to stick to your beliefs and to value proper quality food. We close our eyes too often to understanding the journey that food has made to get to our plates.”

Back in the gardens, Xanthe is deep in mud, creating lasagne raised beds and planning her crops, seeing what will grow in enough quantities to sustain a business. In Wales she has a beautiful, if previously underused, Victorian walled garden to play with, but in Kincardineshire her plot is on top of an unsheltered hill.

“I have chosen to grow similar vegetables in both places, so seeing how the different climates affect how they grow and how they taste is going to be a fascinating experiment.”

The food itself is destined for the various Gladstone family businesses - the holiday cottages at Glen Dye, Hawarden Farm Shop and The Good Life Experience festival in Flintshire - as well as for Xanthe’s own restaurant project, a pop-up supper club in London called Knuckle which she runs with her boyfriend Hugo Ross.

At present they get their produce from the organic vegetable sellers Abel and Cole and the aim is to gradually supplement that with home grown - knowing the exact provenance from seed to plate, closing the gap between grower and eater.

Xanthe is a great fan of the American chef Dan Barber, writer of the book The Third Plate, who has campaigned for ‘Farm to Table’ style restaurants to evolve much further.

Rather than cherry picking the most conventionally highly prized ingredients, he encourages chefs to look at the food that is being underused or wasted along the way. The more unfashionable cuts of meat, the less glamorous vegetables, the parts that would be thrown out. For me this holistic view of ingredients is something that is much more likely to happen when there is a true connection between the growing and the cooking. It is obviously something we get on an individual level when we grow things to cook, but it has been missing from a lot of restaurant food, even the restaurants which put great emphasis on provenance. The browsing of a farmers market selection or the visiting of a farm is good sourcing, but it is not the same as actually growing things and knowing them.

Personally I think all chefs should have a stint tending growing things as part of their training. I believe it transforms a relationship to food – it fosters a generosity with ingredients, a lavishness with herbs and greens, but also a care and respect. The knowledge of how frost and rain and soil affect flavour, when to harvest for specific subtle changes of tastes – these things can’t be learned from bought ingredients, only from grown.

Xanthe is spreading these passions through community projects too - from being a gardening ambassador in primary schools to organising a farmers market for local producers within the walled garden at Hawarden.

There are bees and chickens and a great love of making things from scratch, digging around for the ways things have been done for generations and re-interpreting them for contemporary tastes. Xanthe has a wonderfully evocative Instagram feed, full of vegetarian recipes with vegan versions - and she has given us her recipe for Radish and Carrot Kimchi.

Photo Kinvara Gladstone

Growing and Drying Calendula

If I’m honest, one of the reasons I grow calendula is that it is easy. The name - calendula officinalis - refers to the way that in temperate climates it will bloom every month of the year. It doesn’t quite do that here but there are flowers more months than not. The seeds are large and irregularly shaped - easy for children to handle - and can be grown out in a flower bed or in large pots. Sow in either September to overwinter or March/April. Once you have an established patch you will probably find that it self sows happily. I would love to know how you get on growing calendula and making things from it, such as this balm. Please tag me @snapdragon.life on Instagram or use the hashtag #snapdragonlife.

• Clear a patch of soil in your garden or pot and rake it level. Draw lines in the soil with a cane - about 15 cm apart. These can be straight or a spiral - the point is that you can see your calendula seedlings following the line and weed everything else out. As the plants grow you won’t see the lines at all.
• If it is dry weather then carefully water along the lines and allow them to drain.

   

• Sow 2 seeds every 5 cm along the lines. Smooth the soil gently back over the seeds and water.
• Thin out the plants as they grow so you end up with one healthy calendula seedling every 10cm

OR...

• Sow seeds, 2 to a small pot, and keep watering until you see the roots growing through the holes in the bottom. Then plant into a larger pot or out into the garden.
• Deadhead regularly and they will keep flowering all summer. Or pick flowers for the house, it has the same effect, the more you pick, the more flowers will grow.

How to dry calendula

• It is easy to dry calendula as you can keep the heads intact. You can also use a dehydrator if you have one.
• Choose a dry day so that there is no dew or rain on the petals.
• Cut the flowers off the stems - as close to the head of the flower as possible.
• Spread the flowers out on grids close together, but so they are not touching.
• Put the grid somewhere warm - an airing cupboard is ideal.
• Leave for 2-4 weeks until completely dry.
• You can either leave as whole flowers of pull the petals off.
• Store in a wide wide necked jar or use in recipes.

We have put together a beautiful box with everything you need to grow your own calendula and make your own calendula balm - you can find it here.

Overwintering Dahlias - What I do

The dahlia is a plant that originates in Mexico - there it grows wild and the Aztec name was acocoxóchitl.

It is suited to warmer climates and in most parts of the UK needs to be protected from the frosts of winter. There are a couple of main methods of keeping them away from frost. Some people lift the tubers and store them in sheds, cellars or garages. However, if I take anything indoors it tends to die or be eaten by mice, so this is what I do instead.

That Aztec name acocoxóchitl gives the clue to why I think most dahlias freeze in the winter. The word translates as 'hollow stemmed plant' or 'water carrier' - and the stems were used to carry water on journeys.

In the garden - if you chop the tops off your dahlias to neaten them up over the winter, you are creating hollow straws for rain water to be channelled straight down to the tuber underground, pretty much guaranteeing that it will freeze over the winter and turn to mush.

Instead I do nothing for the first 3 weeks after frost - I just leave the tattered mush of a plant to gently collapse, closing up the tops of the stems as it does so.

Then I remove any broken stems - the ones that snap and fall over - and pour a dry mulch of some sort over the tuber. This is usually spent compost from my tomato plants and garden pots. The rest of the plant remains intact - flowers and collapsed stems stopping the water from getting into the stems. I check the mulch after heavy rain to make sure it hasn't been washed away, and top up if needed.

Last year I added a second mulch of sheep fleeces to half the dahlias to stop the need for topping up. Many fleeces have no commercial value at the moment, something that seems ridiculous, and farmers are often glad to have them used. Wool fleeces make a great insulated and slug repellent covering in the garden*.

To keep the dahlias cosy I simply stuffed the fleeces carefully around the bases and then left them alone until late March/April when the soil begins to warm again.

This does mean that you have a garden that looks a little as though there are rather scruffy sheep lying all over it - and that may bother you. Last year both lots of dahlias came through the winter fine here - the ones with the fleece mulch and the ones with the old compost mulch - but though we had a lot of rain (and I did need to top up the compost mulch a couple of times), it wasn't a particularly frozen winter.

* I have been offered a large bag of fleeces by a neighbour, so I am intending to cover all my fallow vegetable beds with them over winter, possibly over a layer of manure and grass clippings to make a kind of sheet mulch. They are also wonderful for planting hedges and trees into as they keep the ground weed free and gradually rot down. The ones I put on the beds for the winter will probably be reused in some tree planting we have planned for the Spring.