Noel Kingsbury

Links

Colleagues

Sheffield University’s Landscape Department is a world focus for work on naturalistic planting design. Professor James Hitchmough has his own site. Dr. Nigel Dunnett is also very active in this area, as well as being the UK’s leading green roof expert. Piet and Anja Oudolf’s website has details of garden openings.

I work with several leading garden and plant photographers. Andrea Jones is one of the world’s very best.

Thinking and talking about gardens

Along with a growing number of others I am keen to promote discussion about gardens and gardening – their culture and philosophy. Not just something to keep the chattering classes busy over their chardonnay but something to try to make gardens better. Thinking gardens is a website which aims to encourage more of us to make the intellectual leap. Anne Wareham and Charles Hawes have been trying to provoke more of us to do this, and to voice critical thoughts, with their very inventive garden at Veddw House in the Wye Valley. By inventive, I don’t want people to think it is full of ‘installations’, it manages to be a relaxing as well as a thought-provoking place to be.

Breaking new ground

Tracy DiSabato-Aust is one of the most dynamic experimental practitioners in gardening today, and a reminder that we ignore the American Midwest at our peril!

Cambo House in Scotland has one of the best ‘new perennial’ inspired gardens I have seen in years. Gardener Elliott Forsyth has created borders in the old walled garden which reflect many new ideas and every summer plants up an exotic potager; a huge amount of thought and design theory goes into this.

Nurseries

I used to run one, so I know what I am looking at! There seem to be so many now, far more than when I was potting up, writing a catalogue and piling plants into an old Initial Towels laundry van, to get to plant sales up and down the country. Yet few really push the boat out with new plant selections. Here are some that do:

• Crug-Farm Plants. Bleddyn and Sue Wynne-Jones continue to astonish with a terrific range of plants, much propagated from wild-collected seed. Going to their nursery is a bit like landing on Mars – so dramatic is a lot of what they are collecting. Designers should be using this material much more. And they now do Mail Order. Hurray!
• Cotswold Garden Flowers. Bob Brown, who I think looks astonishingly like a large garden gnome, runs a nursery with a huge range of really good plants: divided between easy and reliable herbaceous plants, and more specialist ‘plantsman’ species. There is a lot here you won’t find elsewhere. Bob’s catalogue too is simply one of the best.
• Pan-Global Plants. Hugh Grant look-alike Nick Macer runs a nursery in the picturesque village of Frampton-on-Severn, with a very exciting range of herbaceous and shrubby plants, many of which you will not find elsewhere. Nick has an exceptionally good eye for good new plants – he’s a real ‘plantsman’.
• Sampford Shrubs and Holbrook Garden in Devon not only offers a wide and interesting range of plants but also has a garden inspired by contemporary German naturalistic design. Lots to inspire and instruct here. And they’ve got a strawbale shed!

Other Craftspeople

Jonathan Garratt is a very imaginative potter who works with terracotta made in a timber-fired kiln. In recent years he has branched out into the field of ‘garden punctuation’ – terracotta pieces which can be used to create surprise and witty effects in the garden. Don’t expect ‘safe’ or ‘tasteful’ – his work can sometimes be quite edgy and spiky.