Organic Gardening And Watering Plants

Organic products

Organic gardening hasn't changed much from the way our grandfathers gardened years ago, in some respects. They relied on manure or garden compost to improve the soil, and on fertilizers, such as hoof and horn, or bonemeal, based on animal remains. Strong plants growing in healthy soil have a natural ability to withstand minor problems, but, if needed, our forbears used natural products, like soft soap, pyrethrum, or derris, to tackle most common pests, and sulphur and copper compounds, such as Bordeaux mixture, to treat fungal diseases.

These products and their modern alternatives (which are often specific in their action and less persistent in the environment) are now widely available in garden centres, although since the BSE crisis, many people prefer not to use animal-based fertilizers. Poultry-manure pellets are a good alternative, but 'vegetarian' general-purpose feeds are available from specialist suppliers. Nowadays, a huge selection of organic supplies is available through mail order catalogues, even if your local garden centre doesn't stock them.

Me? I've settled on a system that allows a steady build-up of natural predators and which makes sure that there is no concentration of any one plant in any one place, so epidemics are less likely. I never spray with pesticides — organic or inorganic — and I have learned to live with the odd nibbled leaf and blemished apple. A garden that teems with all forms of wildlife seems to me preferable to one that is perfect but sterile.

Making your own plant food
If you like to do-it-yourself, you can make your own liquid feed by dunking a sack of manure into a water tank for a few weeks. Draw off the 'manure tea' and dilute to about 1:5 with water; use it on your vegetable patch, or for anything around the garden in need of a quick boost. There's an even 'greener' alternative. Fill a tub with nettles or comfrey leaves, top it up with water and cover it with a lid, and a few weeks later you have a (rather smelly) brew ready to use. Dilute it in the same way as manure tea. The nettle version makes a high-nitrogen liquid feed that is good for vegetables and salads, while the comfrey 'flavor' is a high-potash feed that's especially good for tomatoes.

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How To Maintain A Designer Garden

Few of the great gardens of the century belonged simply to one phase or the other. In many cases an estate was worked on by a succession of "improvers", each leaving his distinctive mark. At Claremont, Bridgeman was succeeded by Kent and then by Brown, and the same trio worked consecutively at Stowe, while Repton was frequently called in to advise and suggest alterations to Brown's parks.

ENTER THE IMPROVERS
Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, working for wealthy patrons, were the earliest protagonists of the more informal approach — the first to consult Pope's "Genius of the place". Bridgeman, a practitioner rather than a writer, played a crucial role in the transitional period between the geometric layouts and great radial avenues portrayed by Knyff and Kip at the turn of the century and Kent's freer landscapes.

Bridgeman first came to prominence in 1709 while working for George London and Henry Wise. By 1714 he was already involved with Lord Cobham in Cobham's changes to Stowe, where he installed a ha-ha, and by 1720 was also working at Wimpole Hall, in Cambridgeshire, for the Earl of Oxford. After Wise retired in 1728, Bridgeman became royal gardener to George II and Queen Caroline until his death in 1738.
It is to William Kent, however, that Horace Walpole (vocal gardening and architectural commentator and son of the prime minister Robert Walpole) gives the credit for founding the English landscape tradition. In his essay On Modern Gardening, written between 1750 and 1770,Walpole says of Kent:"He leaped the fence and saw all nature was a garden." During the 1720s and 1730s the designs for the main part of a garden retained their structured formality, with curving lines and meandering paths taking the place of the symmetrical "wilderness" that had often been introduced into the outer areas in preceding years. By 1738 at Rousham, Oxfordshire, however, Kent was interpreting Addison's idea of "a whole estate thrown into a kind of garden" and exploited Pope's invitation to call in the surrounding countryside.

By encircling an estate with perimeter woods, he was able to turn a park into a private sanctum with undulating green pastures, contoured land masses, curving lakes or rivers winding through the valleys, and clumps of majestic trees silhouetted against the sky. On an old estate Brown would destroy the traditional gardens around the house and break up the lines of French-style avenues to form groves of trees. Flowers and utilitarian kitchen gardens were banished from sight across the park. In Brown's hands these Arcadian landscapes became such perfect replicas of an ideal that it was almost impossible to distinguish the separate roles of nature and art. Today a surviving 18th-century park fits so easily into the English countryside that the designer's role in "perfecting" nature has almost been extinguished. These pastoral idylls, planned to stress man's relationship and interdependence with nature and to stimulate moods and emotion, are often regarded as the epitome of 18th-century rationalism.

Plants On The Move: Botanists, Collectors and Artists

The site at Versailles, in marshy ground, was inauspicious, but the canals, designed to be seen from the chateau, helped ensure adequate drainage. The entire formal framework was carved out of the forest, through which secondary allees were cut. Along these rides a variety of bosquets, set pieces decorated with fountains and statues, were carved out as "green" rooms for entertainments. There were 17 original bosquets. Facilities for banquets, fetes, theatre and dancing, all arranged as temporary "furnishings", were gradually replaced by more permanent constructions of fountains and basins, all much altered during the years up to 1713. One, the Labyrinthe, long since vanished, was designed by Le Notre between 1664 and 1667, then redesigned after 1669 to contain 39 fountains and statues from Aesop's fables. Another, the Bosquet Le Marais, suggested by the king's mistress, the Marquise de Montespan, contained a central tree surrounded by reeds, all made of metal, which spouted jets of water, some emerging from the tips of the branches. The elaborate waterworks were the king's pride. The water supply, however, was always short of requirements. A team of gardeners using whistles were needed to turn each fountain on and off as Louis made his royal progress. And the cost of bringing water to the park was vast. A monumental project for raising water 162m (520ft) up from the Seine involved 14 waterwheels, each 12m (40ft) in diameter, powered by a series of pumps.

The garden incorporated most, if not all, the planting ideas expounded by the Mollets — tall tightly clipped hornbeam hedges, used for palissades or berceaux, and elaborate parterres de broderie of box. Flowers were not neglected. Louis was passionate about them, encouraging botanizing explorers to bring back plants to be cultivated first in the Jardin du Roi (established in 1625 in Paris and later to become the Jardin des Plantes) or, if of doubtful hardiness, in Montpellier. In 1672, 10,000 tuberoses (Polianthes tuberosa), only introduced from Mexico in 1629, were grown in Provence and transported across the mountains in wagons to supply the gardens at Versailles. Louis insisted that Le NOtre should see that the gardens were stocked with flowers "even in winter". Other flowers, including bulbs from the Levant and more familiar plants from the Mediterranean, were planted in the box-edged beds of the Grand Trianon.