Christopher Lloyd \u20131921-2006\u2014was an opinionated curmudgeon and one of the twentieth century\u2019s greatest gardeners.\u00a0 A native of England\u2019s East Sussex, he was a great cook, writer, bon vivant, lover of opera and a fount of horticultural knowledge.\u00a0 He loved dachshunds and named his own after favorite flowers.\u00a0 He did not suffer fools.\u00a0 Though Lloyd was passionate about gardening, he was emphatically opposed to the concept of low maintenance gardening.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
To Christopher Lloyd, \u201cinteresting\u201d gardening meant constant evaluation, agitation and frequent, if not perpetual, moving of plants.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Plants were rejected and rearranged.\u00a0 Scores of tender varieties were dug up and stored every winter.\u00a0 In one famous garden purge, tropical specimens replaced roses in Lloyd\u2019s mother\u2019s rose bed.<\/p>\n
The results were stunning, even if some visitors found a few of the wilder color combinations jarring.\u00a0 Great Dixter\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s death in 2006. \u00a0The intensive gardening continues, with Garrett preaching the intensive gardening gospel to a new generation of horticultural disciples.<\/p>\n
Lloyd\u2019s methods and results were impressive, but how can ordinary gardeners, with only limited time, money and minions, hope to duplicate them?\u00a0 I have been asking myself that question fairly often lately.<\/p>\n
Like Lloyd, I look at my beds and borders every day.\u00a0 This is more to keep myself sane than to determine what is wrong with the plants and planting schemes.\u00a0 However, even on the busiest days, I can\u2019t 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.\u00a0 The garden is now thirteen years old, though some parts of it are considerably younger.\u00a0 Mature planting schemes almost always benefit from some amount of rethinking.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I\u2019ll start the process with the roses.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 In fact, I would no more yank out the roses than chop off my toes.\u00a0 Still, my garden is home to two grafted rose shrubs where the top growth has died and the rootstock has taken over.\u00a0 \u2018Dr. Huey,\u2019 the red rose used as root stock, is pretty, but I don\u2019t think the two \u2018Dr. Huey\u2019s\u2019 add enough to the garden to justify their continued presence there.\u00a0 The world is full of beautiful rose varieties and my yard is low on garden expansion space.\u00a0 \u2018Dr Huey\u2019 and his sibling will just have to hit the road.\u00a0 Of course, I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n
Once I have evicted \u2018Dr. Huey\u2019, I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0 After that, I\u2019ll turn my attention to the front garden, which features a corner that Lloyd would undoubtedly find egregious.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Perhaps it is better that way.\u00a0 Christopher Lloyd\u2019s constantly evolving borders are a destination.\u00a0 My garden remains a monument to aspiration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Christopher Lloyd \u20131921-2006\u2014was an opinionated curmudgeon and one of the twentieth century\u2019s greatest gardeners.\u00a0 A native of England\u2019s East Sussex, he was a great cook, writer, bon vivant, lover of opera and a fount of horticultural knowledge.\u00a0 He loved dachshunds and named his own after favorite flowers.\u00a0 He did not suffer fools.\u00a0 Though Lloyd was … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,2,3],"tags":[386,579,385,580],"class_list":["post-831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-christopher-lloyd","tag-fergus-garrett","tag-great-dixter","tag-intensive-gardening"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=831"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/831\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}