On this episode of Dear Gardener, Ben Dark takes us on a journey through the wooded Hampshire Hangers, discussing plants and history along the way. Passing cowslips, wild garlic, incongruous copper beech, and wildly inappropriate bamboo, Ben shares his love-hate relationship with these plants and how they fit in the changing English countryside. Our host also delves into the writing of William Cobbet and his critical commentary on the landscape while relating his own experiences with managing meadows and creating a space for both people and wildlife. Tune in to learn more about the beauty and challenges of gardening.

https://ko-fi.com/bendark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9cs657k9Q4

Episode breakdown:

[00:00:06] Podcast discusses the potential reason behind gardeners' dislike of the colour orange, possibly due to its association with plant blight.

[00:05:42] The English countryside is going through significant change as ash trees are being lost, allowing new plants and vistas to emerge. This is similar to the aftermath of the great storm of 87, which led to a boom in gardening as people were freed up to create something new.

[00:09:50] William Cobbet as inspiration for J. C. Louden. Weather and its importance to nature writers

[00:11:19] Forest floor covered in wild garlic due to deer agitating it in the dawn

[00:14:49] Trees grow conjoined with roots exposed.

[00:18:13] Dan Pearson's newsletter Dig Delve and artisanal tulip bulbs

[00:21:24] Eric Newby's wife and her drunken suitors.

[00:26:05] Description of a house with symmetrical plantings including a native white beam tree and a fantastically shaggy bamboo.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Dear Gardener.

You join me in the woods again today,

this time in the Hampshire hangars.

Was reading House and Garden magazine yesterday,

I think it was their latest one, and they have a special

from Badminton House,

that great grand garden, and it was all about the tulips

there. But some of the things they were showing were the

little box hedges around the south

terrace, very formally clipped with white tulips in the middle,

and they look beautiful until in the corner

of the picture you see the tiniest, tiniest hint of

blight and it's this orange color. And suddenly, for me at least,

the whole scene is ruined. I was wondering to myself

whether that could be some sort of reason behind

the well to do gardeners, the smart gardeners notorious

dislike of the color orange. It subconsciously reminds

them of boxplight, of death, of the expense of

ripping up a new hedge and having to think about things like youonymous.

Up here I can see good trunks

with a nice bit of fluting on them,

something you'd find on a very, very, very well done

Gothic pillar. And look at that. I'm seeing before me

a stand of you going high, high up into the air and sending

off great big sideways branches into the sloping forest

below. Were you to come here and see that

as an alien landed on Earth for the first time and told,

choose some plants for a stately garden,

choose some plants for the Chelsea Flower show, you wouldn't pick this.

You would think, I'll keep that thing well away from my little

fussy designs. Here's the view I wanted to show before I got distracted

by that new plant and the dangers of orange

at Badminton House. House and Gardens magazine

is great, by the way. It contains all sorts of fantastically

unrelatable lines, like, the boot room

really is the engine of the country house. Boot rooms

have a particularly important status in

British cultural life and snobbery. It's kind of

a justification for being in the countryside. You can say, I've got a

boot room. It means that I'm here for dogs and children

and rambunctious fun. I am a true enjoyer

of the countryside and a part of it because it is on me and on

my boots. So you probably hear more talk

in the smart set in the country about boot rooms than any other

room. Interesting, isn't it? I suppose it's an equivalent of hanging

your awards in the downstairs loo. It's a way of boasting about

incredible wealth while still talking

about the quotidian and the mundane. I've come

out now to the most fantastic view on shoulder of Mutton Hill.

Here we see off the side of the hangars,

down to some grand houses.

There's a copper beach planted slap in the

middle of the landscape. It's a fantastic piece of showmanship

planting. It says, I know this is

the premier view spot, probably for

100 miles in every direction, the most beautiful and celebrated

view. And I shall put a vast copper beach,

perfectly, perfectly central in the middle of it

for everyone and all to see. Copper beach I have a funny

relationship with absolutely loathe it.

When planted in a hedge, it seems to suck the light

out of a roadscape and turn it into something

rather dark and tedious, same as planting the dark

leaf cherries in towns. But then when you see it somewhere

completely artificial and grown to a huge height, like in

an arboretum, then you see its value

as something to jerk the viewer out of their out

of their apathy and their oh, there's another oak, there's another beach.

Some things very unlike oak and beach here just come out onto

this little bit of very

steeply sloping, but obviously quite sharply drained hillside.

And there are so many little cow slips and

a juga reapens the sorry reptins,

the common little creeping bugle, carpet bugle,

making quite a nice show together. It's old

hack, isn't it? Doing purple and yellow,

but it does work. Then there's vast amounts of little

roses, little roses growing in the soil,

little wild rose. None of them have got particularly big, so this must get

heavily grazed by rabbits. I'd get come

out here, hop out from these brambly sidings that surround

me and take those roses off later on.

Going to carry on striding up there. It's a big,

big dead ash up there. We are in a

period of intense change in the English

countryside. In some ways it's very, very exciting because we are going to

lose these ash trees that have been so important in

the landscape for so long. And now

we find ourselves at the bit where everyone else,

all of these things here, all of this maple clematis,

u, white beam sticking out of the side of the woodlands,

is going to rush to fill their place.

There will be battles fought over the ash groves

and also we will see views that have

been hidden for decades. Whole hillsides

to my left falling away, giving vistas

unknown that will soon be swallowed up. It's a bit like after

the great storm of 87,

when there was something of a boom

in great gardens and gardening, because those

stayed plants, those things that people had relied

on, the oak that framed the view,

they were all demolished literally overnight.

And people were able to think again, people didn't

want have to worry about, well, I inherited this garden

and this boot room from Great Uncle

Toby, and he inherited it from his Great uncle

Toby and so on and so on and so on, until everyone was called

James and they stole the land from us.

And anyway, now they were freed up to go

and do something new, do something fresh in

their gardens. Maybe ash would do something like that. I found

it particularly pity because it's such a good shape

in winter, it branches nicely and it leads to

exciting silhouettes. And now it's

gone. Very good time, though, to be a saprophytic

beetle, a beetle who likes to get in

there and eat some rotting wood.

Be a good few decades for mushroom

hunters as well. There's another little woodlander

here. Up here. This is Euphorbia little wood

Spudge. Euphorbia amagadilloides, I believe.

One of those things where they think, why did you put a GD

next to each other in your binomial?

What was that for? To trip up us gardening

podcasters. Euphorbia Amagaloidis I

think that's right. Anyway, now up higher into the woodlands

and the first beach just

climbed to the top of shoulder of Mutton Hill. Now it's

some climb walking along Cobbt's way to to

Cobbt's View, which is perhaps

the most famous view in these part of the hangars. I don't think we're

going to go and see it. It's the one where William Cobbt, in that

Rural Rides passage, looks out over Hawkly and

is moved by the splendor of it all. I read

quite a lot of Cobbt start of this year. He's a really

strong influence, I think, on J. C.

Loudon. J. C. Loudon famous gardening

publisher and gardener himself later on, who imitated

Cobbt in being a very,

very aggressive, self promoting pamphleteer.

They were both almost self publishers and they both went out

and did this Rural Rides reporting, where they

would take to horseback, sometimes coach and

tour the countryside. Loudon visiting Great Gardens,

where he was incredibly keen on

giving out paternalistic advice to young gardeners.

If he found someone sober, upright and well shaved,

he would give him an improving volume of something or

other. And for all that,

for all of his concern with aesthetics, you don't really

get much critical commentary on

the gardens he goes through, whereas Cobbt will comment amongst

all of the disparaging remarks about the roughness

of the local dress, about the state

of the poor people generally caused by their landlords.

In Cobbt's case, he will talk about the

subliminity of nature, and particularly in the passage

where he overlooks Hawkly. We are

constantly teasing ourselves for always starting

any conversation with the weather, but you realize from

reading these things that of course you did, that of course you did.

You didn't know to pack your great coat or to pack your silky

little stockings, which I'm sure Cobbt wore, unless you talk to

local farmers who would tell you, or you think they'll go

from in from there and invariably be wrong and mislead you.

And you'd get it to your coaching in late at night,

soak through and take to bed. This is muddy country, as Cobbitt

would tell you. There's lots of pockets of clay,

not like the South Downs below.

I'm going to stumble off down this path down here,

vast banks of wild garlic. I came up here early this

morning. I was in the hills by 07:00, a bit

before and you couldn't really smell anything. But the day is

warming up out there. And now there is the most fantastic garlicky

smell. All of the deer who've been trotting around here, I've been seeing little deer

paths. All of those deer have been agitating it

in the night, releasing some compounds, is passing a view

that would not have been here five years ago, wouldn't have been here two years

ago. A view out to a little farmhouse through the

dead stems of ash trees, the forest

floor below completely covered in wild

garlic, which might well be the result of that

divock anyway. My gardening this week has

been of the lawn type. I've been mowing

the meadow and I have been

attempting to make a usable space again.

I love meadows, but I do think gardens are people

places as well as wildlife places,

and there needs to be paths through them. And also seating

areas. And around those seating areas, little circles,

little crop circles where a child can

play.

Lots of yellow rattle. The Rhinanthus

minor, it's hemi parasitic, as opposed to

holoparasitic hemiparasitic, meaning that it can survive without

parasitizing other plants for their nutrients. But it

really prefers to and it sends

out this wonderful organ,

this root organ, into the surrounding plants

to suck away their nutrient and thus reduces their vigor.

It's not an obligate parasite of grass. In fact, I don't think it even

favors grass. It likes to take

from as many host species as possible,

so maybe it'll take some carbohydrate vigor from

a really good bit of grass. But then you've also got

the leguminous plants, the clovers,

the nitrogen fixers that it can

wrinkle into as well. And then you get nitrogen,

which isn't freely available in the soil. And it's

been shown that some plants, I think they can be sucking

from at least seven different species at once.

That's quite a varied diet. I think doctors would approve of that.

They don't go for annuals. What's the point? There isn't the density of nutrients

in an annual's root. Why would an annual be storing nutrients in its root?

It's not coming back again. It's all about that one summer. So they

go for perennial plants and they just weaken the whole

perennial patch that they're in, allowing more chance

for things to come in more wind blown

annuals or rarer small seeded things like

the orchids passing the most amazing conjoined

beech trees here. Their roots really are meshed.

We're in a sunken lane and the soil has

shifted over time, shifted from these

plants. Soil shift is actually quite a

common phenomenon. Hills this steep, it tends to move

away from plants and leave them with their roots exposed. But here

you can see that trees, probably 15ft

apart, are completely conjoined. The roots

are here, about six

foot away from the ground. It's a very impressive

effect. Were you a sort of Toby? Toby descendant

of James and James? You could plant

for this plant on a sandy mound and just

make her a praviso in your will.

That along with taking all of his eldest sister's

land, your son has to wash away a little bit of the roots.

And each year if everyone does the same thing, then eventually you'd have

great big Tripid trees standing on

elevated stumps. Be quite an amusing effect.

You probably do something like that. Well, you probably could have done something like

that for the Chelsea flower shape. Show the roots off on a

tree, go and go and jet wash it all out. You only have to keep

it alive for a week. But you're not allowed to kill things at Chelsea

anymore. It all has to be completely reused

and carted off onto another worthy

site.

Anyway, I hope you're enjoying these

solo podcasts and Out On the Road podcasts.

I did and do mean to create

more of those mashup episodes. It's just that everyone's so mean about

them. All my reviews starting off saying,

I'm sorry, Ben, but one star, I don't

know why. I think they're fantastic. I think they're a new direction in audio

and one day they will be heralded as such. Just out now,

popped from the path onto a tiny bit of road. I'm only going to be

on a second and it's amazing. Suddenly you see, AHA, someone must

live here. There's horse chestnuts about, there's ornamental planting.

There's even an orchard. There's an orchard through this hedge.

Little apple tree orchard looking rather pleasant.

Quite a lot of tip bearing species in there, just doing the last

of their flowering. Very gorgeous to see. This is quite

a traditional hop growing area.

Sadly no longer, but it used to be lots of hops

and oath houses around here. So you get those exciting

pointy buildings and there are relics

of it in the landscape. You see the shelter belts

of poplars planted, aging out

now and falling apart as, as poplars do. But they were planted

there to stop the wind from pulling

at the hop poles and bashing them around.

Hop itself doesn't matter. Hop hop doesn't mind being knocked on

the floor and starting growing again. But if you've constructed

a wonderful hop yard and it all gets knocked down by a summer

school or autumn school, then you get a bit upset. So you plant your poplars

and you protect your fields. You do still see

it occasionally growing in the hedges

around here. Lots and lots of hazel, lots of hazel

for the poles. Lots of coppice hazel now grown out and

unmanaged. Those woodlands that I was in earlier are

pretty unproductive, apart from taking poles

from so probably taking poles of you and poles of

hazel and other understory trees

that are allowed to be managed. This is hop just walking

past. Some hop now, growing vigorously

through some elder and a young hazel. So there is the relic,

there is a relic of ancient industry still remaining

here. Someone could come and do an artisan

hop field here. I think that would go down very well in our

world of artisanal stuff.

I was listening to what I was reading, actually a

very good newsletter by Dan Pearson,

brilliant designer, and he writes

a newsletter called Dig Delve, which is less about less

about design, more about plants. And in it this week,

he was calling attention to the damage

done by Dutch factory horticulture

to Tulips. They're all treated with

sulfides and chemicals and insecticides and fungicides

and then sent out. And he made the reasonable point that

those of us who like to take the organic choice

don't make a second glance at an organic bulb. I hadn't really

even thought they existed, but of course they do. And he's been buying them for

about twice the price. It must be said as normal.

Bobs and I think I ought to do the same thing. But anyway,

the reason I started talking about that artisanal nature

of the things I'm sorry, I'm being a bit truncated here because I'm shuffling over

a bog. There's an incredibly wet bit. This bit has

had a lot of clay soot washed into it and

we are boggy. Anyway, that's a diversion from a diversion.

The artisanal thing. There was an advert, It's farmer

Gracie, who sponsored a lot of gardening podcasts. And when I was listening

to, there was a host reading and saying, bulbs lovingly

produced from the heart of the tulip growing area of Holland.

And you think, well, all it needs is someone to stop for a second and

say, like, I don't want bulbs from the heart of the Tulip area growing in

Holland. Tulip area in Holland is horrible. It's completely polluted

by vast amount of aggro chemicals from the heart of

the Tulip area in Holland means from a field amongst a

thousand field all drenched in tractor

spray residue. I'm just as susceptible as everyone else.

We don't think that as soon as we hear a geographic specificator

on the product, we think, oh,

gosh, lovely. It must have been produced by a lovely

young yokel. Or even better, an old yokel. An old

yokel with all the power of tradition in his

horny hands. As reading last

night, Eric Newby. I don't think we ever read Eric Newby anymore.

The travel writer, and he's married to an Italian.

I was reading his Journey Around the Mediterranean, the great bit about his

Italian wife. They still go back to the agricultural festival

every year and his wife does

a couple of days work in a local hotel. Still, just tradition to

help out. And every year, inevitably, some widowed

farmer in his 50s proposes marriage

to a wife after drinking 14 glasses of

cheap, locally made wine. But I guess that doesn't happen anymore.

I guess that widowed farmers in their 50s

in the north of Tuscany just go on to

go on to the apps like everyone else. Start specifying

required hip ratios.

Chestnut trees. Peering in the landscape again.

Human dwelling. Be close.

This has felt the hand of man, I should say.

There is now a oh, yes. And look, a vast copper beach.

A vast copper beach peeking over the hedger over there. I should say

that this podcast now has a video component.

I have a little camera with me recording as

I wander. So if you want to see some of

the things that I've been talking about as I say them, you can do

that. You can go to YouTube. Probably to dear

Gardener TV. That's why I'm planning to put it. But don't know

if that's available or not. It will be there. If not,

then it'll be somewhere linked below this episode.

Just to see a very gentle video of

the things that I've been walking past. A few other

bits of podcast homework, I'm afraid.

We really need to get rid of those one star. I'm sorry, Ben, but not

for me reviews. So if anyone wants to leave a review,

your reviews would be really greatly

appreciated. And as always, the podcast

can be supported at COFI. That's K-O-F-I

combendark that

address does exist and will help

me to pay for hosting and other things like that.

Plus a really nice patch of lammium there.

Really gorgeous. What a woodland wonder.

Another member of the Mint family. Like that juga

reptins we were seeing way back at the beginning.

This is cultivated back into the comfortable world of gardening.

Nice fox club. Very, very subtly done. It's a gorgeous,

gorgeous part of this world. This part of the world,

rather. I wish that I could spend more

time here. It's the hills and the gullies

living in Copenhagen. Beautiful though it

is, it has not that variation

in topography anyway. Is it beautiful? It is.

The people are beautiful, culture is beautiful. Here we go.

Look at that. The weird otherworldly influence

of the vast copper beach showing that there

is a stately manor around somewhere.

Someone with an ambition for

an arboretum. Yes. Other than that,

obviously. Go and buy the book and

see my thoughts in written down form and

get out and enjoy the countryside around you. See what

you can find. It really is quite

fun to do those little bits of detective work.

You don't have to just do it on the city street, as I did in

the book. You can do it in the countryside and try and find try and

find the relics and the future direction. Because we

can't step in the same stream twice,

as they always say. We can't walk the same walk twice. This will

change seasonally, but also as the

climate changes, as the fungal diseases take things

out. Oh, look, here we shift from wild

garlic to cow parsley. The froth,

the light and airy cow parsley gone.

Gone from the dark into the light. Oh, my goodness.

Just passing a grand entry to a house.

And it's got symmetrical plantings on either side of a gate

and a drive running between Cobb Beach. And one

of the plantings is a very nice native sorbet white

beam, as we found in the U forest. And the other one is the most

grand and hairy old trolls.

Mop of bamboo. A clump former,

but gone completely wild, gone out of control.

Someone's old Uncle Toby, maybe two Toby's

ago, didn't follow the rules,

didn't plant plant the washing out trees that we were going

to take to Chelsea and planted a little bit of bamboo by their driveway

instead. And now look what's happened. It's a very nice bench here.

Takes me back to what I was saying about importance of seating in

the meadow. How lovely to sit on that bench,

put on an episode of Dear Gardener,

let the world drift on by, with which I

will drift back on by. I'm going to come up this hill.

The pub at the top won't be open yet, but I will sit

around. Maybe maybe I'll wait for opening. Is this

a day's work? Is this a morning's work? I think so.

Go and have a pint. Thank you very, very much for listening. And I'll

be back again next week with with another episode