1) Cytisus scoparius

Scotch broom is my ultimate shrub, I love, love, love it! With evergreen upright whipcord stems, even in winter its a striking architectural plant. In spring, bright yellow flowers emerge with a wonderful spicy scent. The flower buds are edible and best when picked before opening. While gardening books recommend trimming them for added bushiness, I much prefer its natural windswept habit that is open, with strong upright main stems. It is my current ultimate plant for explaining what I mean by the look of the wild way. There are various cultivars and hybrids too. I love the way its flowers contrast with our dark grey door and stone.

• Height: head height

• Position: full sun to slight shade

• Soil: any free draining, though I find tolerant of…

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I’m looking at the little pose of asters on my desk thinking, ‘how did it come to this?’ The pale lavender of some remind me of talcum powder and blue rinse hair dye. I promised myself once to never like asters, and yet, here we are, not only liking them, but loving them.

It started with Eurybia, drifted into the wild garden escapees seen along roadsides and train tracks. Welcoming their ragged colour in October when everything else is finishing. Then I fell head over heels for the bold purple ‘Violetta’.

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I believe this is Laccaria laccata, the deceiver mushroom, but I’m not totally sure yet. Identifying some fungi is really easy because they’re distinctive, while others are really hard because they look similar to tens or even hundreds of other species!

While there are fungi to be found all through the year, I look forward to autumn so much these days to see what fungi we find. Fungi are a whole other kingdom of life-form to plants and animals, and it is a vast and interesting one to explore. Adding a whole new dimension to our experience of the world. Over the last few years, I haven’t stressed about learning lots of fungi, but through curiosity the names have been going into my head and I now know many of them.

The main things to look for to identify them initially are habitat, location in the country, time of year, overall shape, cap shape, stem shape, texture, colouring. It’s amazing how you start to see distinctive details you never thought were there when you really begin to look…

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September has arrived and with it the start of a new colour palette of late-season flowers. This is one of my favourite points in the year, as light wanes, the Autumn colour ramps up, fighting against the coming cold with a deep, rich warmth. These plants have real impact and bring me a whole lot of joy. Almost always my designs start from these plants and work back to spring because it guarantees you an extremely long growing season. Which is good for wildlife too.

1) Lobelia x speciosa ‘Hadspen Purple’

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Based on previous Wild Ways, you could be forgiven for thinking I’m aiming for some kind of Sissinghurst white theme in our garden, but I promise there are a lot of colourful flowers, they’re just taking their sweet time to show up. With this week’s heat, the spicier colours have begun to emerge, discussed throughout this issue.

In this issue

• 10 plants for a summer spectacular

• Do this month: what to sow, harvest and propagate

• Observations: did plants think it was autumn?!

• Visit Malham Cove in the Yorkshire Dales

• Late-meadow flowers and returning insects

• Further reading

10 plants for a summer spectacular

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Variety is life - everything above is edible

Polyculture is the term used to describe growing multiple different crops in the same space at the same time. Poly means many, and culture refers to growing. The opposite is monoculture, where a single crop is grown on mass, such as fields of wheat.

It’s not a new idea, old fashioned potagers are polyculture gardens, mixing edibles with flowers. Various indigenous communities have farmed like this for millennia.

My aim is for polyculture, which I’ve been doing for years in areas around the farm, because it’s more interesting from a soil and wildlife health perspective, and we know monocultures can be bad for that. But I don’t think the world is fully there with some essential crops, and we still need rows of some veg, such as carrots or beans.

In the above photo I’ve included a selection of edible ‘things’ we grow on our farm that I harvested yesterday (you might spot the odd one out…) From left to right, they are:

• Free range eggs: for protein…

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As I write this to you I’m anticipating the delivery of our long awaited garden table! It’s taken us three years to save for and finally, we’ll be able to sit out with friends properly through summer for drinks and meals. I’ve jet washed the patio at the top in preparation because it was dangerously slippy, also to better even out the colour of the old strip of stone and the new half we added last year. It’s a good space, not too big, and I like that one side is raised above the slope of the soil. I often stand on it looking at the plants from above.

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At the back of Wild about Weeds there’s a list of additional ‘weeds’ to consider and in that list is one of my favourite shrubs, if not my very favourite: Cytisus scoparius, the wild common broom. I love its whip stems that range from vertical spikes to fountains that sway in the breeze. It looks both wild and contemporary and captures my style of design possibly better than any other plant.

Brooms just say ‘wild’ when you see them (not literally). They flower a bright yellow in spring with the scent of warming spice.

In our new garden I have planted broom into every area. From the species in the wilder area to a number of colourful hybrids. I love them so much I plan to take cuttings from them all this summer to grow as many as possible. These days, I try to include broom in almost every design.

Cytisus prefer acidic soils in direct sunlight, they thrive in poor conditions with no need for nutrient rich soil and are very hardy. They’re pretty content among thick competition. In the wi…

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PULMONARIA

When we moved to our garden in Yorkshire some of the most vigorous plants already here were the Pulmonaria in a long side border. I’ve always liked and appreciated Pulmonaria in other gardens but down in our old place I never grew them myself. I guess I was too focussed exploring other plants. I remember first properly noticing them at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh when I started studying horticulture in 2015/16.

I did later zone in on the cultivar ‘White Sissinghurst’ and trialled a division on my old London allotment given by my friend and fellow gardener, Steve. It grew well but we moved before I had a chance to fully assess how it did over time.

Here though, the garden itself has encouraged me to explore Pulmonaria by presenting me with a bunch of different cultivars. Over the last few years I’ve watched as they emerge into growth in late-winter before quickly flowering in spring in various w…

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IN THIS ISSUE...

• Wild Way: curious winter fungi and epiphytic ferns

• Plants of the month: 10 x flowers brightening end of winter

• From the Studio: thoughts on 3D garden design software

• Observations: propagating masses of plants for free

• Food: last of the winter crops

• Further reading: a few more March ideas for your garden

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Is it because I’m getting older that I’m less excited about ordering seeds this year? Or perhaps with experience comes familiarity and less chance of spotting some thing new? Oh, I just thought... am I just becoming (more) boring? Probably.

But then, looking at the mountain of new vegetable seed packets next to me on my desk, I also have to ask myself, who am I kidding? Many of are my trusted, favourite vegetables, though there are some new cultivars, such as the very exciting dried bean ‘Yin Yang’ with beautiful black and white seeds.

Perhaps the answer is that these days I simply grow much more than I used to, and new plants become a smaller proportion of that? I guess, whatever the reason, the truth is that I am more excited about growing the crops I already know perform and taste the best. Growing them slightly better this year than last and the challenge in that. And I’m much less excited these days by ‘trying something new’ as the seed companies and magazines encourage us to d…

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To start 2024 I thought I’d treat you to a plant combination special, to give you ideas for your own garden. It’s also good for me to look back because at this time of year my own energy is at its lowest and I think negatively about the year ahead: “I’m not going be able to do it all again.” Looking at photos from the growing season in winter always surprises me, things went better than I remembered. In the photo above the garden is fuller than I thought and in the next photo, the garden is glowing at dusk as I’d hoped. It’s easy to dwell on the negatives in gardens, standing back with some hindsight can help us find the energy for the year ahead.

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With the frost moon this week came the start of winter for us, heavy frost, snow and temperatures lower than -3C. The change in the garden has been quite remarkable as the colour is wiped from the scene…

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PREPARING FOR WINTER

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In 2023 I went all in growing annual sunflowers. Over the years I’ve visited many National Trust gardens in autumn and fallen for the various amber and orange varieties that inevitably grew among veggies, so this year I grew a whole bunch myself!

Last winter I carefully selected a few very special colours, from left to right they are: 'Red Sun', 'Pro Cut White Nite', 'Earth Walker' and 'Ruby Eclipse'. The fifth is also ‘Ruby Eclipse’ as the petals emerge, technically called a ray floret on sunflowers.

These are all smaller multi flowered varieties that have been flowering for a couple of months now and are still going. They grow to between shoulder and head height, so they aren’t massive. They’re all good, beautiful plants and I’d recommend any. My favourite is the rust colour of ‘Earth Walker’.

Growing them was pretty easy, though I will confess to you that I had to buy the seeds twice after every seedling sown directly in the ground was eaten by slugs in April. It was a co…

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In the vortex (read Part One), the shady area below our main garden, I’ve been experimenting with bolder colours while still aiming for a semi-naturalistic look. I’ve been inspired by our walks through the lush lower layers of the British Columbia temperate rainforests in Canada. In some ways, I want this area to remind me of the memories of Chris’ sister Lucy marrying her wife Jenny through the nature we saw on that trip. Rich in green groundcovers and the odd vibrant jewel like flower.

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Our garden is starting to emerge, and with it, a look that’s at one time how I imagined, and another, mostly plants doing unexpected things. I find this a constant joy when planning planting schemes, that you set things on a course and then nature does what it wants. A few of the main plants featured in these photos include: in the middle Thalictrum delavayi ‘Album’, seed raised unknown purple Hylotelephium, umbellifer Cenolophium denudatum grown from seed and, one of my new favourites, Artemisia lactiflora 'Weisse Dame' (the big fluffy on the right). The bright white star-like spires on the left are Campanula pyramidalis, which I grew from seed last year.

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ASTRANTIA

When I rediscovered the joy of growing plants about ten years ago, I remember thinking there wasn’t a single flower I knew that I really loved the look of. The flowers I saw in most gardens were all a bit ‘take it or leave it’, so I set about exploring to find at least one I could say reflected my style.

It took a while but I found it in the Brighton Pavilion gardens one lunch break, a bright white star. The spiky shape fit my impression of contemporary style, those bright flowers held on rigid stems standing out cleanly from the greens below.

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If I were sensible I would have started our main garden by planting one small area. Only when those plants were fully grown, would I move onto the next area, before repeating this process seven or eight times. But I am not sensible.

Instead, I’ve tried to do the whole garden at once without enough plants. I don’t have enough because I also want to grow everything from seed, cutting or small plant, which has left too much soil bare in these early years, tipping the balance in favour of self sown wild plants to take over. In the middle of a farm full of wildflowers, there is a phenomenal number of self sowing plants!

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Many people moan to me in despair about what to do with slugs and snails when their plants are being nibbled and we can’t use pesticides. I understand the moan, I’ve moaned about this too in the past. Until I realised the truth. We have been trained by companies that make money from these products to rely on them to solve imaginary problems.

The answer is to set ourselves boundaries and stick to them. One boundary being to never use pesticides. Only by making this switch, like reducing unhealthy food to reduce our cholesterol, do we set a boundary that challenges us to look at the world differently, to find better answers.

By looking at the world differently, new solutions arise. Boundaries are not the restrictions people think they are. As an artist, I love boundaries because they actually make you more creative in overcoming them.

Many years ago I used to use organic slug pellets in our old garden city but then I stopped cold turkey. What would happen if I didn’t use the…

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