Ecological Garden; secrets of success

 IDEAS FOR A LOW MAINTENANCE ECOLOGICAL GARDEN
It's cheap, it's easy, it's collaborative and ecological, and it's a beauty!

( Millennium Garden, Canal Fields Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire)

I’m no longer at the stage of looking for a perfect man – now I’m on a quest for a perfect garden:  one which pretty much looks after itself, is rich, colourful, inviting and interesting all year round, a joy to the environment and a place of peace.  When I wander past the Millennium Garden in Canal Fields I get a tingle in my spine – could it be the one?

I decided to meet Betty Patterson who came up with the idea for this garden in 2000 and who made it a reality in collaboration with the town and borough council and local volunteers.   I want to find out how it’s done. 

I arrive three minutes late and Betty is already at work so I join her in pulling out a few tufts of grass and bindweed, strangely invisible among the invited plants.   

‘How often does this need weeding?’

‘Oh, about once or twice a year…’

‘ONLY WEEDED TWICE A YEAR?  YOU MEAN IT? ’ I exclaim rather too loudly.   I’m shocked, jealous, and incredulous - my garden is a jungle two weeks after a tidy up, and yet each time I pass this garden, winter or summer, it’s always uplifting, blooming in a wild but orderly fashion.

‘Oh yes.  We do some in the summer, with a main weed in the autumn, that’s all.’

‘How come it needs so little weeding?’  I ask

‘It’s a mixture of close planting…’ she points to the first bed where large and small shrubs and clumps cover all the earth, leaving no space for weeds  ‘And for this bed, we used a weed blanket, which with gravel on top which keeps the humidity in and the weeds out.’

I love it.  It needs no prinking and pruning, no garden nick-knacks, there is no temptation to use weed killers and pesticides, no need to fertilize, it’s good for the environment, and it just does its thing all year round, year after year.  On two weeding sessions a year, it always looks well groomed in this season’s colours.

At this point another visitor comes up to us:

‘I do love this garden – it’s so lovely, it’s BEAUTIFUL!  I’ve come to take some photos – I want my garden to look like this’ 

‘And it’s low maintenance’ I say proudly, ‘low watering…’

‘NO watering’ corrects Betty.

No watering – that’s impressive!    With careful analysis of existing conditions, creating the right conditions and choosing the right plants, watering just isn’t necessary – and it looks just as good as ever after this spring’s drought.  

‘What motivated you to set up this garden?’ I ask, once our visitor was busy manoeuvring her stroller between the beds and aiming her camera.

‘My first thought was biodiversity.   If you look at the surrounding trees they are all wind–pollinated and so no insects.’ 

I notice the pale pink anemone, a mass of bud clusters and first flowers, is busy with white bottomed and orange bottomed bees, wild honeybees and hoverflies, and butterflies sup at the budlia.     

Betty continues :  ‘…I also felt it was possible to build a public garden that was less expensive to plant and maintain than the traditional ones, and I wanted to show that there is another way which costs next to nothing and is good for the environment.  I wanted it to be an educational experiment’

‘Well it’s worked!  Where does your gardening inspiration and knowledge come from?’

‘I’m not quite sure…I did study botany, so I know about the plant families and what conditions they require…I do come from a family of farmers – so perhaps the farming genes have come out !  I started to turn botany into gardening as the children grew up and needed less from me’

Love always comes into good gardening I reckon, along with a good dose of knowledge, inspiration and determination. 

‘I love perennials, herbaceous plants – the ones which die back in winter but come up and flower year after year’.

Now she’s really lighting my candle.      I’m of an age when I’m less and less inclined to tolerate bedding plants pulled up in their prime to be replaced by younger models, and more inclined to relish plants at all stages, fruiting, seeding, and starting all over again.

‘I’ve noticed with your gardens each plant is happily flourishing in its own space, in harmony with its neighbours…whereas my garden seems to be a war for world domination…’

‘Plants are like people  – they like people around them, but they need their own space.  In the autumn I split up the clumps that have grown too big and are crowding out the others’

How do you start when designing a garden, deciding how to plant it, which plants to put together?’

‘I came up with the general layout, but after that it sort of planned itself - it’s a creative thing, a bit like sitting down to paint a picture…’

For her picture, Betty chooses a range of herbaceous perennials which offer a rich variety of size and form, leaf colour and styles, flowering times, interesting shapes and seeds once the flowers are over, and winter interest.  She finds plants that can not only survive but thrive in the wet-dry, hot-cold of our increasingly extreme climate. 

Something which impresses me about this garden is that it’s a collaborative project, Betty knew it could be done, she approached the Borough Council for permission to use some of Canal Fields, and they liked the idea and joined in the experiment – they did some of the heavier ‘construction’, shifting earth, building raised beds from recovered wood and share in its maintenance.

    

‘At first it was rather difficult to tell the weeds from the plants, but now it’s more obvious!’ says Betty.

We take a tour of the ‘damp’ bed:   

‘Tell me about planting for all seasons” I said

‘Here’s a pineapple tree’ says Betty, ‘it has early flowers, and you’ve got the winter viburnum, witchazel and the jasmine, with the rose hips and holly berries in the autumn and winter.  I really cherish the winter flowers, heather,  then there are the grasses, laxula, a sprinkling of golsethum mat - silver lambs lugs – and a few evergreens.  The Anemone is very good, it starts flowering in July and goes right on until the first frost.  I notice that many plants when they are seeding and dying back still had texture and shape among the evergreen leaves, there's no need to worrying about tidying them or ripping them up, even dock seedheads have a certain copper charm in the support of a well structured garden with a variety of planting.

It’s July and the hollyhocks and golden rod are flowering, wild fennels are waving their yellow flower hands – at their feet catnip and marjoram flower, along with a bush of Hopley oregano rebeccia gold stem, herbs I would have thought would be more at home in hot dry conditions, but they were flowering happily, amid the purple red and yellow of variegated leaves.  

  “As soon as one flower goes over, a new flower opens…”

Overall, the form and structure is strong, and holds up if some plants are not at their best or a few weeds creep in:  three crescent shaped beds with the canal for backdrop, the middle bed raised with recovered wood, with grass paths in between giving access to gardeners, admirers, and small people who love to run – and a bench in its centre for those seeking peace.

‘I feel a garden should have an atmosphere of tranquillity’ says Betty.

“It’s important to prepare the ground at the start, the soil should be dug over, and for example there is a weed blanket covered with gravel on the dry bed and the wood chip (general bed) is  decorative, especially when the small plants are first put in,  but most importantly it minimises dehydration and weed growth.

You need to understand the conditions and choose the right plants for the job – for example, plants which will survive a wet ground with occasional water logging for the ‘damp’ bed, and plants happy with dry conditions in the ‘dry’ bed.

Betty engaged two local volunteer gardeners to share the load; Ian Shaw built the ‘damp’ bed, Freda Earl (my mum!)  was responsible for the maintenance of the ‘dry’ bed, and many locals donated the original plants.  The Town Council, although not responsible for the land, was keen to support the initiative and donated plants, and the current town council continues to view the garden with pride.  It’s a success story of how a few knowledgeable and enthusiastic gardening locals worked with the town and borough council to realise an exemplary garden project (it’s won awards) at almost no cost, and for the pleasure of all. 

The Millenium Garden  a much loved public space.  In the hour I spent with Betty there was a stream of appreciative visitors  - enough people are fond of it to pick up and throw away the odd burger box and beer can.  It blooms with a little care from a lot of people.