Summer Movies 2015: New Garden Ideas

Every summer and winter I like to head to the theater for interesting or fun movies where plants are the movie stars. Over the years we've watched some zany sci-fi shows, period pieces, documentaries, and main stream movies in our quest for movie star plants. This summer, I'm turning to Penelope Hobhouse's DVD collection, The Art & Practice of Gardening: England, Ireland, & America. (Kultur Films, 2008).

Hobhouse was one of the inspirations for our plants-on-the move theme in 2014, and I continually reference her book The History of Gardens. The Art & Practice of Gardening includes 13 programs, and I've selected three of them for our summer movies series. One caveat for those of us gardening in the San Francisco Bay Area, some gardens are lush and green, which may be a little tortuous! But be inspired, and look for ways to implement the spirit of these gardens into our dry native gardens.

New Garden Ideas

Hobhouse opens the program from Coach House, her gravel garden in Bettiscombe in Dorset, England. Here Hobhouse has created a dry garden, with limited water, and experimented with growing plants in unconventional ways. She uses grasses, drought tolerant plants, and gravel as mulch. The plantings seem natural and wild, but she  actually has a plan behind the planting.

Later she visits with John Brooks, an international designer, at Denmans Garden in West Sussex. Over time he has come to rely more on foliage, and less on flowers, in his designs. His garden is a series of rooms, each planted differently. He uses abstraction (such as dry river beds), and asymmetry in his designs, and implements objects, such as art, benches, and fountains.

Hobhouse visits a private garden in Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, USA, which is designed by James Van Sweden (1935 - 2013). This landscape implements a meadow instead of a lawn, and is planted in grasses of all types and sizes. The breeze off the bay keeps the grasses rustling and sighing in a lovely way. Curving paths meander near the house and down to the bay. 

I appreciated seeing these accomplished gardeners trying new ideas in the garden - water-wise gardening, use of foliage, relying on lawn alternatives (like meadow, gravel, tall grasses), and embracing foliage more than blossoms.