Planting frenzy is beginning. Nurseries are open, those backbones of the biodiversity in British gardens. There is plenty to buy and in Britain we are all still spoilt for choice. Before I start a new season’s choosing, I like to go to a garden on a soil different from my own to see the last vestiges of winter and the beginnings of flowery spring. It makes up for what I miss on alkaline soil at home.
Often I tune up for spring in the Sir Harold Hillier Gardens near Romsey and Ampfield in Hampshire. They are a shining example of how support from a local council can enhance ecology, diversity and beauty. Harold Hillier, the gardens’ founder, died in 1985 but remains a titan among experts in trees and shrubs. He had an encyclopedic knowledge, exemplified in the invaluable handbook The Hillier Manual of Trees & Shrubs, which is an essential resource.
His Hampshire nursery still supplies public and private gardens on a grand scale. Meanwhile the Hillier Gardens, supported by Hampshire council, draw in thousands of visitors yearly. They end a happy day with a bout of shopping in the plant centre which has been enlarged as part of the bigger whole.
The Hillier Gardens can grow the camellias and rhododendrons which at home I cannot. They have also been enlarged to include a winter garden. Its progress is an encouragement to anyone with room to follow suit. The winter garden was opened in 1998 and enlarged in 2014 to cover four acres. Visiting them, I signed off happily on winter before pursuing traces of spring.
I especially admire the winter garden’s combination of hellebores and heathers, ones which we can all grow, and the bare stems of a dogwood that is still vivid in March. The dogwood is Cornus sanguinea Midwinter Fire, an excellent choice whose clumps of fiery brightness illumine gardens until April when the stems come into leaf.
It is extremely easy to grow but like all brightly stemmed cornus bushes, it should be pruned very hard next month to ensure young vivid growth for next winter. Cut it right down to its central core of wood at ground level. In the Hillier Gardens, old plants with big basal roots were looking spectacular on a sunny Sunday. Pruned hard, they have remained about 3ft high, easy to accommodate on a bank, say, up a driveway or in wilder parts of a bigger garden.
Heathers run in front of them, a family I used to ban from gardens. I have learnt better. Two years ago, I saw how that great planter of college gardens in the US, Beatrix Farrand, chose heathers for the flower beds she looked out on from the ground-floor windows of her last country home on Mount Desert Island, Maine. Since her careful choices, the varieties on sale are so much better. They no longer look like skinny refugees from a Scottish moor. There are even good ones for gardeners on moderately alkaline soils.
They are the named selections of Erica x darleyensis, a hybrid that probably arose in a garden with the help of bees. The Hillier Gardens use pink-flowered Epe, but Ashwood Nurseries near Kidderminster lists an excellent range and supply by post. Take your pick, remembering that Silberschmerz is an especially good white, one of those that flower continuously from late November until early May. What else spans winter and spring so generously?
Behind the heathers at the Hillier Gardens, individual plants of the Corsican hellebore showed clusters of rounded apple-green flowers. Other hellebores have been so beautifully improved that this old favourite turns up less often, though it is extremely easy to grow. Like the stems of the cornus, its flower stems need to be cut away after blossoming so that fresh young leaves can push through and make a bold clump of toothed greenery during summer. Nurseries usually list it as Helleborus argutifolius, but there is no need to buy a big plant. One young plant in a 9cm pot will soon become a feature and as an adult will seed many children round it.
I could plant a garden like this one, I thought, never having done so, and in it the heathers and cornus would soon block out the weeds. Drifts of these plants with some big-leaved bergenias would look handsome for at least five months. Pondering the possibilities, as you should, I set off for the other side of the garden, set in 180 acres, and segued into early spring.
Spring in the Hillier Gardens means magnolias. Follow the discreetly chosen signing and head for the restaurant and Jermyn’s House, the opposite end to the winter garden, and you will see what I mean. On the way I had memorable encounters with many other items waiting to open as spring advances. The Hillier areas now hold about 42,000 different plants.
Hunting for camellias en route, I found a red double, Adolphe Audusson, in fine flower, one to mark as a first choice. It was named in 1910 and yet the Hillier bush is a reminder that it is still excellent, either in a pot or in a garden with acid soil. Wishing I could grow it, I walked back down the great double border, another post-Hillier addition, and was consoled that it looked no more lively just now than mine, except for clumps of the little yellow daffodil Tête-à-Tête, one I patronise too for the same purpose.
I was then put back in my place by a yellow-flowered beauty that would never grow well on lime in the Cotswolds. Corylopsis pauciflora is a fine shrub, free flowering with pale yellow bells and excellent in light woodland or lightly shaded places. Its more familiar name in the US is buttercup witch hazel, but even as corylopsis it is readily available in Britain. It spreads widely rather than vertically but is never awkwardly big. I envy it, but at least I have been to Hampshire to see it at its best.
On the rebound I came to the high point, the big trees of Magnolia soulangeana that run up the main sightline from the windows of Jermyn’s House. This broad walk first amazed me in April 1987 and this spring, as usual, the survivors are covered in hundreds of buds. If night frosts permit, they will be spectacular in the next fortnight, a sight worth a journey. After praising them in the FT, I learnt that Harold Hillier planted them on the spur of the moment because he had a batch of soulangeana magnolias going spare. What looks pre-planned was planted on impulse.
From an earlier visit to the gardens in April 1982, I first realised the beauty of pink Magnolia x loebneri Leonard Messel, a Hillier favourite. The UK had just begun war in the Falkland Islands, a faraway dot in my stamp collection, but this fine magnolia took some of the puzzled apprehension out of the afternoon. I assumed, wrongly, it was difficult to please except in acid gardens, so I admired it and let it be. In 1987, stunned by the magnolia walk, I bought a Leonard Messel and it is now the star of my garden, 20ft high, well branched, and happy enough in alkaline soil. A visit to a garden, a plant bought as a memento and then years of patience: they are an excellent recipe for success.
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