I’ve never been so pleased to see a slug. It was sliming its way up the door of the Arid House, ignoring stands of slug favourites from delphiniums and hostas to sweeps of salad seedlings: a rare imperfection at West Dean Gardens in the UK’s rolling South Downs.
The gardens are steeped in horticultural excellence, as well as Surrealist and royal history, making a daunting project for Tom Brown, who became head gardener five years ago. Then came the first lockdown and his team was furloughed.
Anyone else might have hung up their boots. Not Brown. “It gave me time to think,” he says, and he came up with changes to increase sustainability and decrease waste. So far, his innovations have bumped up visitor numbers to around 80,000 and added what will no doubt come to be seen as his own historically important changes. And we’ll come back to the slugs.
West Dean’s recent history is a delightful or burdensome extra dimension, depending on your perspective. It begins when Edward James, the great Surrealist patron and creator of Las Pozas gardens in Mexico, inherited the estate in 1932, by which time he was already a friend of Magritte, Dalí and Leonora Carrington.
His parents had more conventionally swanky connections: King Edward VII was a close friend of his mother; architect Harold Peto was a school friend of his father; Edwin Lutyens (New Delhi’s designer) was commissioned to create Monkton House as an escape from the main house, and Lutyens’ working partner and friend of James’s mother, the great Gertrude Jekyll, may have drawn up a planting plan.
What is certain is that in 1905 Peto created the 300ft pergola at a time when Edward VII’s regular visits caused genteel outrage and rumours that he was James’s father as well as his godfather.
In 1971, James turned his flint-faced house into a college for design, arts, crafts and conservation with an archive of Surrealist material. Two years later, he appointed Ivan Hicks head gardener, and together they played with garden ideas, many recorded in a richly illustrated correspondence which has yet to be published.
The garden at the Gardener’s Cottage on the estate, now a tea house, included a copy of the Dalí/James Lobster Telephone (the fragile 1938 original is inside West Dean House along the corridor from the faded red Mae West Lips Sofa from the 1930s) and chunks of cloud-painted canvas referencing Magritte’s work.
Now that the shrine to Surrealism, Monkton House, has been sold, two 20ft fibreglass tree trunks sculpted around dying trees are all that remains of James’s Surrealist spirit in the 92-acre grounds. But Brown hints that he may “loosen the corsets a little” without dropping the horticultural rigour established by his predecessors Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain.
That rigour is particularly clear in the 4-acre walled garden where 13 Victorian glasshouses and attendant cold frames are still going strong, and in the orchard’s 100 apple varieties that continue to thrive over carpets of snake’s head fritillaries.
“Those were big boots to fill,” says Brown as we pass glasshouses of nectarine, apricot and peach blossom. He has repurposed the cucumber house, which is now an arid house full of oddities such as elephant’s foot plant, Testudinaria elephantipes and more familiar specimens such as Echeverias and the trailing Sedum morganianum.
“We are producing food for flavour rather than size,” says Brown, glancing at some spears of purple asparagus pushing through richly manured compost; carrots growing under fleece, salad seedlings, the cutting garden and the perennial nursery.
“The carrots will be followed by fennel. We produce food for the college and the visitors and sell any excess. We are also running our own nursery to reduce cost, as well as waste and plastic by avoiding commercially grown stock with plastic labels bigger than the plants!”
All this on a full-time workforce that has been reduced from nine to seven. To lessen the workload, Brown cuts the topiary into globes and domes rather than the elaborate Arts & Crafts styles that dominated when Edward VII was a regular visitor; and he has cut back strimming the arboretum. “More biodiversity,” he says firmly.
One of his striking innovations is a dry planting beside a length of the River Lavant that snakes through the gardens. Brown, who came from RHS Wisley Gardens via Parham House in West Sussex, wanted a weed-free rippling meadow resilient to climate change. To achieve this, and to the horror of visitors, he imported a Canadian technique using rubble as the planting medium. A digger created an undulating 10cm layer of the rubble which included 120 tonnes of local broken concrete. It was cheap and gave excellent drainage.
A year later, despite being flooded for weeks, the 2,000 specimens, mostly grown from seed, survived and thrived. Planting in groups of seventies and eighties instead of the more usual threes and fives gives a muscular feel to the area. In April, when I visited, the pale rubble made an attractive foil for the emerging echinaceas; the 1.5m-high yellow-flowered Rudbeckia maxima; Gypsophila pacifica, the pinky white baby’s breath; purple-flowered Limonium gmelinii ssp hungaricum, which does well as a dried cut flower; spikes of giant hyssop or Agastache Liquorice Blue; the thistlelike blue Eryngium planum, and other deep-rooted, drought-resistant plants which can reach through the rubble to the soil, leaving annual weeds high and dry. The random planting is beginning to present its own patterns with species tulips, which usually come back every year, leading your eye to the outer reaches of the “concrete” planting in spring.
On the far side of the 17th-century flint-fronted house, Peto’s rather more conventional feature, the 300ft pergola, is being restored. Brown plans to continue the pergola perennial border around the end of the pergola lawn, so giving more coherence to the area, which currently trails off into a yard at the back of the house. Brown may also redesign the borders as a sort of linear plant library along the lines of Tom Stuart Smith’s in Hertfordshire.
Then there are the paulownias, lots of them that have suckered and seeded from a towering specimen near the river. The fast-growing tree which produces panicles of purple-blue foxglove-like flowers in spring was unusual in the late 1980s when I first came to West Dean. Back then, head gardener Hicks would cut down young specimens every year, so forcing vast, jungly leaves, a tradition that continues today.
“With pests, disease and climate change . . . we aren’t sure which species
will thrive,” says Brown. A diverse community of natives and
non-natives is a way to “play the odds”, he adds.
Near the Paulownias, a once-magnificent chestnut has been pared back to remove its dying branches, leaving an eccentric-looking habitat tree where jackdaws are currently nesting. From dead limbs Brown makes biomass for the college and glasshouses; habitats for insects such as stag beetles; as well as benches and dead hedges.
Brown and his team are working miracles. But how on/in earth do they manage to stop the slugs eating everything? “Just a good natural balance,” says Brown.
Jane Owen is an FT contributing editor and garden author
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