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Adults: $15
Under 16 & Diggers Club Members: Free
By Jeremy Francis
Above: The ‘Old Laboratories’ with the Geoffrey Jellico Canal in the foreground.
In 1878 George Ferguson Wilson purchased a small farm near the little Surrey town of Ripley, with thoughts of turning it into a garden. Wilson was a man of many parts, a scientist/inventor and canny businessman who, on developing a new insecticide, made himself a fortune. His passion, however, was for ornamental horticulture. And with this in mind from 1788 he began accumulating land, and was soon planting what is now the oldest part of Wisley, the Oak Woods.
Wilson, when he died in 1902, made it be known he wanted the property to go to the RHS. Substantial funding to enable this was required and this came from Sir Thomas Hanbury, whose family made their fortune importing tea and silk from Chins. Thomas is famous now for his glorious Mediterranean garden, La Mortola, running down to the sea on the border between Italy and France.
Wisley’s site, close to London and near the M25 (a minute’s drive from the number 10 off-ramp) and the busy A3 makes it the perfect for the Royal Horticultural Society’s headquarters, and everything is on the grand scale. The gardens comprise 240 acres and are cared for by 200 staff and with its own off-ramp from the M25 Wisley attracts more than one million visitors annually.
Having been a couple of times over the years, last June we thought we should do the place justice and allowed three days for our visit. And I can recommend anyone thinking of doing likewise and in need of accommodation should try the Talbot Inn at Ripley, the little village just along the A3. This was Nelson’s favorite Inn in the busy times leading up to Trafalgar. On his many coach trips between London and Portsmouth he stayed often and I could not help but notice most ceiling beams are his height plus a tiny bit. Anyone five feet high plus not much should be prepared to duck.
And back to Wisley.
Wisley from the first was to be a ‘demonstration’ garden. Its many individual gardens illustrate pretty well every aspect of cool temperate gardening one can imagine. The photo above for instance is a planting to find alternatives to Buxus sempervirens which sadly is being destroyed around the world by ‘box blight’. Blight is simply devastating. As mentioned in my earlier article on Sigale, the box which had been the main under-storey plant of the oak woodlands of that part of France has almost vanished since we were last there in 2012. Sooner or later box blight will arrive in the Dandenongs and I dread the day. Here the RHS is trying several plants that might serve as a dwarf formal hedge. I couldn’t help noticing not one of them compares with box though, and came away thinking perhaps we should be looking at some of our smaller natives for this purpose.
The first day of our visit we’d put aside to help with a meeting between Talei Kenyou (on the board of the Diggers Foundation) and a senior RHS staff member, Helen Feary. The plan being to discuss reciprocal arrangements between the RHS and Diggers, and it was a very positive meeting so fingers crossed.
This was all made possible by Laurel Ems, a horticulturalist originally hailing from Melbourne who has been working at Wisley for yonks as the nursery supervisor for the ‘shrubs, roses and trees’ section and someone I have been in touch with for ages. Or rather Laurel has been in touch with me, emailing to put me right whenever I make a mistake with latin nomenclature in my newsletters and, as you might imagine, frequently in touch.
The first morning Valerie and I had the job of dashing to Reading Railway Station in our hire car to pick up Talei, then dashing back to Wisley via the 3,246 roundabouts in between, me paying attention to the GPS lady with the fierce BBC accent saying veer left, veer right, ‘straight-over’, each time, while also listening hard to Talei as we figured out approaches for the vital meeting. Despite the gazillion roundabouts, all went well. Until I happened to notice that our computer lady, for obscure reason, was directing us via Gatwick Airport, a very long drive drive past where we wanted to go. Still, we were (almost) on time and, as said, the meeting went swimmingly.
All this is in by way of saying that the following day was the chance to relax and sight-see. Laurel and her friend, Linda Dolan (the supervisor of the herbaceous perennial section of Wisley’s very comprehensive nursery) both now retired and available to conduct tours, very kindly showed Valerie and me all around the very interesting nooks and crannies of Wisley.
Above: Laurel and Linda and the woods of Battleston Hill.
Above: A tree removed, its trunk left behind and sculptured with a chain saw. An idea to borrow for the Cloudehill Woods perhaps?
Above: Logs left on the ground. Something we had also been seeing at Great Dixter and Sissinghurst. Anyone visiting the Cloudehill Woods will notice the same, except our log piles are gigantic.
Above: A view of the Piet Oudolf Gardens looking down to the new glasshouse on Wisley’s west boundary. These plantings are still raw and need a year or two to mature.
Above: Looking back to ‘the Mount’. Viewing mounts go back to medieval times and hortus conclusus gardens. This one serves as a jumping off point into a very contemporary garden. Piet Oudolf is famous for his plantings on New York’s Highline Garden. Try googling to see what I mean, then extrapolate to Wisley.
Above: Two new smoke bushes. I was much tempted to sneak through and check their (very small) labels, however, such behavior is beyond the pale.
Above: A familiar plant, Themeda triandra, looking exactly as it does on road verges around the Dandenongs. And, I must say, an interesting place to see it growing. Kangaroo grass needs at least 50% sunlight to do well. The nearest should be north of the Great Divide. The only reason it occurs locally is due to Aboriginal landscape management traditions and their use of the firestick previous to dispossession.
Above: The view back to the Mount showing how the perennials need another season to perform to expectation.
Above: At this point we said goodbye to Laurel & Linda in the midst of the yellow, all of us admiring the phlomis and hemerocallis and achilleas and Stipa gigantea. Thankyou again, Laurel, for your help. And Linda, for our tour.
Above: A garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith. The Cylinders are made from clipped beech. I have planted a variegated Fagus sylvatica near Season’s deck with similar in mind. The three narrow cylinders in our grass garden, though, are Acer campestre Elsrijk, a compact form of the European hedge maple from Holland. .
Above: The bonsai garden.
Above: A juniper and I must check with Jeff Barry (Chojo) to see exactly what this form (of bonsai) is called.
Above: The Wisley Rock Garden, made by Pulman and Sons between 1910 – 12. A group of Japanese maples each side of the steps. Pulman and Sons were legendary for their work and this probably is their finest surviving project.
Above: Rodgersia podophylla.
Above: A deep purple-red Dierama.
Above: Natural-looking waterfalls are extraordinarily tricky to make. This one is excellent.
Above: Plunged Pots in the Alpine House.
Above: The Crevice Garden, made recently by Zdenek Zvolanek, famous for inventing ‘crevice gardens’. Just last year, the Ferny Creek Horticultural Society hosted a workshop on how to make your own.
Above: Wisley’s Tufa Garden.
Above: Tufa gardens go back to Edwardian times and alpine botanizing by people like AE Bowles, the author of ‘My Garden in Spring’, ‘Summer’, ‘Autumn and Winter’.
Above: Wisley’s Mixed Borders. The grandest (more-or-less) herbaceous borders I know. They form the spine of the gardens.
Above: Dahlias and heleniums.
Above: Helenium ‘Sahin’s Early Flowerer’.
I would happily give my eye teeth for this superb plant. It flowers early and goes on for months, each flower overtopping the previous one and always looking neat and tidy. Sadly, Sahin’s Early Flowerer is impossible to import and somehow we will have to breed something similar for ourselves. Antique Perennials at Kinglake are busily doing just this with Sahin’s Early Flowerer very much in mind.
Having said all this, tighter quarantine regulations were long overdue. Exotic pest and diseases appearing around the world is vastly accentuating the damage climate change is doing. Currently polyphageous ‘shot hole borers’ are spreading throughout Perth and destroying huge numbers of trees and many different species. (Some 500 are susceptible!) I understand marris are also at risk which, if so, means one of the most important eucalypts in the South-West could be on its way to extinction. Let’s hope not!
Much of this damage I think can be sheeted home to international trade. The expansion of trade in recent decades has exactly paralleled the spread of exotic pests and diseases. Someone I know working in quarantine was given the job of keeping the Japanese stink bug out of Australia. His job was to check every vehicle imported from Japan to Australia looking for this little beast, and with good reason. One stink bug in a silo of wheat can emit enough stink to contaminate the entire umpteen tons and afterwards, no self-respecting pig, sheep, cow or human can tolerate the taste. When you think, Japanese stink bugs are only one of many thousands of insects that, if on the loose, are capable of wiping out entire industries and ecosystems. Australian quarantine officials have no hope of keeping up and international trade guarantees this will be a problem until all the world’s ecologies are eventually homogenized. Something economists and politicians seemed to have forgotten in their enthusiasm for untrammeled trade.
Above: Veronicastrum Lavendelturm
Above: Nepeta (I think) longipipes, Veronicastrum (possibly) Dianne with a dark-leafed plant behind with a name escaping me.
These borders are perhaps six metres deep and stretch for I guess 200 metres, with a broad grassy path between which leads to eye to the ridge leading to Battleston Hill. The highest point of the path serves as a useful spot for sculpture. So long as it is monumental. Here we have ‘Still Waters’ by Nic Fiddian-Green.