From Ed Ikin, Head Gardener of Nymans in West Sussex

It’s finally here. After several false dawns, we have a proper drought summer, the first since 2006. At times like these, you realise just what a knife edge we garden on.

Give a classical English country garden regular, but not excessive, rainfall and mannered summer sunshine, ideally not exceeding 25oC, and it thrives. Any variation on this - excessive heat, prolonged dryness or heavy storms – and we quickly enter a world of stress and worry, our plants no longer appearing ‘fit’ for the site.

These are stressful times for Nymans too. But not that stressful. Good soil and enlightened management stretching back a century have given us a robust site and doughty plants not prepared to give up after a couple of dry weeks. Our lawns, never watered in living memory are still green not brown, and our roses and herbaceous perennials have yet to ask for water.

The big challenge lies with the Summer Borders. This homage to high horticulture, a densely planted patchwork of 6500 annuals, is the heart of our summer display, deeply ingrained in the affections of tens of thousands of visitors. How do we satisfy them while reconciling our reluctance to water? We push our bedding to the limit whilst maximising the potential within the soil. Organic matter and root enhancing fungi are added and then the game of patience begins. Can we avoid watering today? Can we wait another 24 hours? What are the moisture levels deep in the soil where the roots are? We know that annual bedding is robust: Dr Tijana Blanusa’s ongoing work at Reading University shows that when annual are given minimal water, they don’t die, they grow differently. Leaner, wirier, tougher, more resilient and yet still willing to flower. Right now, our watering intervals are 10 days apart.

The summer may challenge us further, but Nymans’ fundamental characteristics – a well-chosen site, full of well-chosen plants, will see us through.

Thoughtful Gardening by Ed Ikin (National Trust Books £14.99) is a user friendly, clearly written guide to ‘green’ gardening. Novice gardeners will learn all the essentials from this but there are lots of nuggets for the more experienced gardener too. AG

Fenja in her rose garden at Mariners in Berkshire

From Fenja Gunn, artist & plantswoman

Recently I was asked if, as an artist, I ever painted imagined plant combinations and then translated these into actual schemes for my garden.  Why did I feel guilty when I replied that I rarely did this?  I only had to remember and quote from a brilliant talk on colour in the garden by Timothy Walker, the Director of the Oxford Botanical Gardens.  He showed our local gardening club slides of the same group of plants photographed at different times of the day.  At each stage the colours of the plants changed dramatically as the light and direction of the sun altered throughout the day.  There is no way one could capture this accurately on paper in a one-off painting of an imagined group of plants. It would require a whole series of paintings and this would drag you away from the pleasure of actually getting your hands into the soil and working with real material.   I prefer to visit gardens and nurseries, look at plants and then imagine them in my garden.  If you put a plant in the wrong place – I frequently have – it can always be moved together with several watering cans’ worth of water.
 
The one part of the garden which I planned meticulously on paper was my rose garden.  But this was a diagrammatic planting plan in pencil: the colour scheme of the roses I planned from seeing actual plants, using books and the expertise of Peter Beales rose nurseries.  I wonder if every garden lost its share of plants this winter? We certainly did.  But the roses have emerged triumphantly: more beautiful, healthier (I hope a gremlin is not reading this over my shoulder) and first covered in buds and, now, a mass of blooms. My colour scheme is of cream and pinks from the delicious soft pink of ‘Felicia’ to the wicked deep purple of ‘Cardinal de Richelieu’. It always annoys me that even the most  well-seasoned gardening journalist insists that all old roses only flower once.  This is total rubbish.  My rose garden is made up of old shrub roses and many of them continue to flower throughout the season; ‘Rose de Rescht’, ‘Comte de Chambord’, the hybrid musks ‘Prosperity’ and ‘Felicia’, pretty little ‘Mousseline’ and that favourite of Gertrude Jekyll’s, ‘Old Blush’ – a China rose that begins so early and finishes so late in the season.
 
Although I love roses and they appear everywhere in my garden and not just in their designated area, it’s the interplay of a wide variety of plants that gives me pleasure.  I think in terms of drawing rather than painting – by this I mean the outlines of different plant shapes, the structure of foliage.  We have a garden of flowing borders that slope upwards from our house. It is essential – or seems to me to be so – to punctuate the borders with architectural plants to contrast with my scheme of exuberant and naturalistic planting.  Colour of course is the magical element in any garden. At Mariners, I think of the place and its plants as a painting, but not one which could be interpreted on paper or canvas. It exists in three dimensions in the open air, with shade, light and the movement of air and wind constantly mutating the picture.

Robert Jamieson at work

 From Robert Jamieson, Head Gardener

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been getting to grips with the casualties of the long, hard and still persistent winter. In Northumberland we’ve seen the most snow for years and a low of -12°C. We’ve been lucky in that none of the special trees or shrubs have suffered too much – the main problem was weight of snow, so we continually went around clearing snow from the branches to stop them from splitting. A couple of rhododendrons tipped over but these have now been put back up and should recover well, as will most of the trees and shrubs. We do appear to have lost most of the osteospermums and diascias, but we always take cuttings of these so have plenty of replacements in the nursery.

  A ray of hope of better things to come are the snowdrops bravely awaiting the melting of the snow in order to give a good show during the rest of February. As they finish flowering at the beginning of March we’ll start to move lots more from the woods down into the main garden – a fiddly job that will keep our four gardeners and sixteen garden volunteers busy for most of the month. We’re closed for the hardest winter months – from the middle of November to the beginning of February – and the break, when we concentrate on planting and tidying, seems to get shorter every year. But by now hardy visitors have returned to meander through the drifts of snowdrops – perhaps it’s the thought of a cup of steaming Earl Grey tea and a piece of home-made cake that encourages them to wrap up and venture out (the gardens, arboretum and tea room are open for the snowdrop walk Wednesday to Sunday, 10.30am to 4pm).

 The garden continues to evolve slowly and peacefully, though as the spring approaches we sometimes find ourselves acting just like swans on a pond – appearing serene and graceful while working frantically behind the scenes to get everything ready on time. Last year we were named 2009 Garden of the Year by BBC Gardens Illustrated and the Garden Museum. It is great to get recognition for the hard work we have put in over the last 26 years to create something that rather than being a quick fix is something that will continue to evolve and develop over many years to come and hopefully will continue to give pleasure to visitors long after we have gone. It has involved us in even more work, however, for one of the reasons for the award was that Howick is ‘a gene bank of material from all over the world… meticulously documented’. So we’ve spent a lot of time in the arboretum this year trying to keep on top of our meticulous documentation – mapping and labelling as well as pruning and tidying ties and guards etc. Even though it has been slow to establish, the arboretum is thriving and we’re often surprised by just how quickly the trees are now growing, especially the Abies densa, which put on about 1m growth each year and produce large purple cones on relatively young trees, and the Chinese pterocaryas, which put on similar amounts of growth and really enjoy the conditions here. And at long last our visitors can now take a pleasant and rewarding one-and-a-half-mile walk all the way down to the sea.