True Dirt

cats and kings at Wisley

The Royal Horticultural Society's garden at Wisley, unlike the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, immerses the visitor in the passion--you might say obsession--and eccentricity of the English gardener. It is a garden theme park for the plant person, largely unconcerned with landscape design but mad for the individual specimen. Arranged as a rambling series of "rooms" and clusters of glass houses, with ponds, a canal, massive perennial borders, and an alpine rock garden "stairway," it packs into one destination all the elements that an American gardener like myself identifies with my English counterpart--voluminous borders, miniature everythings, glass houses for vegetables, cunning espaliers, secret benches, hedges, alpine rock plant mania, fish ponds and ducks, and a feline tour guide.

The horticulture society may be royal but this garden is decidedly aimed at the small lot gardener. In fact, most of the exhibits, except for the canal and the alpine garden are contained in small spaces. The vegetable plots are a wonderland of space-saving devices, including small glass houses packed with massive tomato vines chock-a-block with gorgeous fruit. Melon vines are trained to compact trellises and the fabulous looking fruit hangs neatly in mesh bags. An entire miniature orchard is contained in four pots--the tiny trees with their full-size apples and pears espaliered on miniature trellises. Even the massive perennial border is a model of space efficiency. Each ten feet or so of the border contained a separate color palette that explored an amazing range of complementary hues as well as shapes and sizes of plants.

The garden at Wisley is full of ideas, though not the kind that inspires a resurfacing of your quarter acre with a backhoe and a ton of masonry. It made me think about how a bench might be placed under a fetching berry bush, or building myself a Rapunzelean glass tower for my harassed tomatoes. The perennial border is out of the question in my tiny square of a yard but the plant combos were enchanting and reproducible. In some cases there was too much of everything like in the sculpture garden with reflecting pond where seemingly a million plants vied for my attention.

Maybe the most surprising thing about Wisley was how many people were there on a Sunday afternoon. Whole families, blue-hairs and the fanny-pack set, young and old, long-hairs and the generously pierced, all peering at plants and generally enjoying the horticulture, royal or not. But to me the most English thing about Wisley was Timmy, a very large, very sanguine cat who appeared to be the only staff member on duty that Sunday. Happy to escort us as we wandered about the alpine rock gardens and glass houses, he obliges to sit for a leisurely photo op. And for those who might doubt his official capacity, a chain collar and engraved tag declare that he is "Timmy, Rock Department."

Posted by briggs at October 19, 2005 2:44 PM