Christopher Lloyd –1921-2006—was an opinionated curmudgeon and one of the twentieth century’s greatest gardeners. A native of England’s East Sussex, he was a great cook, writer, bon vivant, lover of opera and a fount of horticultural knowledge. He loved dachshunds and named his own after favorite flowers. He did not suffer fools. Though Lloyd was passionate about gardening, he was emphatically opposed to the concept of low maintenance gardening.
“The high-maintenance garden is the most interesting,” he said in a 1995 newspaper interview, adding, “It gives the most chance to develop different ideas.”
To Christopher Lloyd, “interesting” gardening meant constant evaluation, agitation and frequent, if not perpetual, moving of plants. Every specimen in his five-acre garden at Great Dixter was evaluated constantly so that the garden had a succession of blooms, colors and interesting foliage. Plants were rejected and rearranged. Scores of tender varieties were dug up and stored every winter. In one famous garden purge, tropical specimens replaced roses in Lloyd’s mother’s rose bed.
The results were stunning, even if some visitors found a few of the wilder color combinations jarring. Great Dixter’s long border, with mixed plantings of annuals, perennials and shrubs became famous and bus loads of tourists still arrive every year to see and learn.
Of course Lloyd had help, including, in his later life, a brilliant head gardener, Fergus Garrett, who took over the running of the Great Dixter gardens after Lloyd’s death in 2006. The intensive gardening continues, with Garrett preaching the intensive gardening gospel to a new generation of horticultural disciples.
Lloyd’s methods and results were impressive, but how can ordinary gardeners, with only limited time, money and minions, hope to duplicate them? I have been asking myself that question fairly often lately.
Like Lloyd, I look at my beds and borders every day. This is more to keep myself sane than to determine what is wrong with the plants and planting schemes. However, even on the busiest days, I can’t help noticing combinations that are less than perfect, plants that are too crowded and specimens that are simply not pulling their weight and should, therefore, be pulled out. The garden is now thirteen years old, though some parts of it are considerably younger. Mature planting schemes almost always benefit from some amount of rethinking. The rethinking process is about to commence here, even though I will have to move more gradually than Lloyd and focus on labor saving techniques. I’ll start the process with the roses.
I love brightly colored dahlias, cannas and banana trees in the right settings, but unlike Lloyd, I have no desire to tear out my roses in favor of those plants. In fact, I would no more yank out the roses than chop off my toes. Still, my garden is home to two grafted rose shrubs where the top growth has died and the rootstock has taken over. ‘Dr. Huey,’ the red rose used as root stock, is pretty, but I don’t think the two ‘Dr. Huey’s’ add enough to the garden to justify their continued presence there. The world is full of beautiful rose varieties and my yard is low on garden expansion space. ‘Dr Huey’ and his sibling will just have to hit the road. Of course, I’ll have to dig out all the soil where the two roses resided, in order to avoid rose-specific replant disease, but the anticipation of new varieties makes the effort worthwhile.
Once I have evicted ‘Dr. Huey’, I’ll provide the bearded iris with some breathing room by dividing them, giving some away and consolidating the rest in a few places where they will have more garden impact. After that, I’ll turn my attention to the front garden, which features a corner that Lloyd would undoubtedly find egregious. Several lovely yarrow are involved in an unholy alliance with a wayward patch of creeping phlox, a few Oriental poppies and a particularly fecund group of fall-blooming anemones. All are good plants, but they should be separated and relocated for their own sakes, as well as for the overall health and beauty of the garden. Besides, if my suburban neighbors knew the kind of dangerous liaisons that can happen when rambunctious plants are forced to live in such close quarters, they would be scandalized.
Rethinking and remedying the rose, iris and congested corner situations does not sound like much in Christopher Lloyd-ian terms, but I guarantee the effort will take until the fall. Perhaps it is better that way. Christopher Lloyd’s constantly evolving borders are a destination. My garden remains a monument to aspiration.