RHS Journals

The Garden
July 2001

It’s green not grim up North

Geoffrey Smith argues that southern gardeners do not have the monopoly of favourable growing conditions

Gardening in Britain is a popular national art form. The operative word is ‘national’, for it describes precisely the universal interest in plants and their cultivation. Just as classical music is based upon folksong, British gardening is founded upon the cottage garden; it provides the standard of simplicity and harmony against which more elaborate compositions can be judged.

Pundits perceive North-South divides in many facets of our daily life, but do such differences extend to horticulture? My practical experience over 40+ years of designing, planting and maintaining gardens in Norfolk, Cornwall and County Durham allows me to compare cultivation techniques, breadth of plant choice and differing attitudes in North and South. The 20 years spent developing the trial and botanical gardens at Harlow Carr near Harrogate, North Yorkshire, for the Northern Horticultural Society (NHS), also brought me into contact with the diverse opinions of visitors from all around the world.

Having spent nine years in Yorkshire, both at college and working in a large private garden, optimism and curiosity led me to Cornwall. Climate and seasonal routines proved markedly different there, yet it was not the perfect gardening environment that northern gardeners might imagine: there has only ever been one such, which sadly was lost thanks to the persuasive charms of a woman and a man’s taste for apples. Once I had adapted to the southern counties’ calendar, with March replacing April as the growth quickener, I found no difference in either cultivation techniques or attitudes between North and South.

Though seasons were earlier in Cornwall, there, as in Norfolk, wind was the serpent in Eden, imposing severe restrictions on what could be grown. Hedges gave much-needed protection: beech, yew, privet and thorn were familiar to northern eyes, but I also found Pittosporum, Escallonia and Griselinia which, I was assured by ‘experts’, would not survive full exposure in a northern garden: how wrong they proved to be.

The now-controversial x Cupressocyparis leylandii had not then made an impact. I first encountered it when a trial batch was sent to Harlow Carr Botanical Gardens, where I had moved after 12 months in Cornwall. I’ve grown it ever since and can say, with the authority born of experience, that, properly cared for, it makes a superb shelter belt. Without the long, 3.7-m (12-ft) high, close-trimmed hedge of it that shelters my present garden from the west wind funnelling down the dale I would be reduced to growing nothing but alpines.

The prime purpose of Harlow Carr was to provide a demonstration ground where gardeners could see a vast range of plants growing under truly northern conditions. Being blessed, as I was, with a confidence born of ignorance proved an advantage. I felt that ‘tender’ was a term invented by southerners to stop northerners enjoying the beauty of an Embothrium, framed like a pillar of scarlet against a May sky, or the virginal loveliness of Magnolia denudata with the soft greenness of spring all around. Fortunately, support for the garden (from northern, southern and even Dutch nurserymen) allowed highly experimental plantings to take place that the then still-infant nhs could not have funded on its own.

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Geoffrey Smith, writer and broadcaster, was Superintendent of Harlow Carr from 1954-74

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