Hyde Hall Gardens, Essex

The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) is a big deal in the UK. It’s the largest non-profit gardening organization in a nation obsessed with gardening, and does everything from running the Chelsea Flower Show to promoting nation-wide gardening campaigns. And it’s as royal as it sounds – half the board of directors seems to have some sort of knighthood or royal title. Among the many things the RHS does is maintaining four large public gardens spread across the UK: Wisley, Rosemoor, Harlow Carr, and Hyde Hall. Hyde Hall is the relative teenager of the group, having been gifted to the RHS only in 1993 (compared to Wisley, which has been an RHS garden since 1903). As a result, Hyde Hall is still a work in progress with the requisite growing pains.
The challenge at Hyde Hall is that it is built on the framework established by the previous owners, Dr. and Mrs. Anderson. Mrs. Anderson was a keen gardener, but not a designer. When she arrived at Hyde Hall, the area around the house was a dumping ground for rubble, and the surrounding land had been a working farm for hundreds of years. Mrs. Anderson set to work enthusiastically, cleared the rubbish and bramble, planted over 60 trees and defined herbaceous borders and vegetable plots. While the results are pleasing enough in a traditional English garden sense, they are somewhat unspectacular in the context of the present garden. Using a 1955 layout conceived by an amateur gardener is rather limiting if your aim is to develop an innovative, modern public garden. However, Hyde Hall has a lot of room to grow, and I did find that the new areas the RHS has been developing are extremely well done, boding well for the future of the garden.
The best thing the RHS has done is embrace the character of Hyde Hall and develop new gardens with this in mind. Hyde Hall is defined by its location: an exposed, hilly site, with strong winds, poor sticky clay soil, cold winters and the lowest rainfall in the UK. Appropriately, the centerpiece of the current garden is the limestone rock garden. Planted in 2001, it already looks fully mature, and both the design and the plantings fit the site perfectly. For once, this is a rock garden in a spot where one is completely appropriate.
The bolders are large enough to make an impact, and so are the plants. They aren’t the usual tiny rock garden plants carefully set one foot apart in a gravel bed and requiring a magnifying glass to see. They're big grasses from all over the world, bold yuccas, stately self-seeded verbascum and incredibly orange California poppies. The garden isn’t artificially irrigated or otherwise babied along. This is a great example of a rock garden that actually works.
The even newer parts of the garden are works in progress. A new visitor center is just opening along with a huge parking lot (not exactly an attractive addition but a needed improvement over the current, steeply sloped lot which can be tricky in a manual car). The new gardens embrace a naturalistic approach around the hilly site, and many are already growing well. In one area I spotted this great combination of breezy Stipa grasses with a flowering shrub, which I believe was a viburnum though I didn’t find a label for the exact name.

Glen Chantry, Essex, England

The Chelsea Flower Show was a great and unforgettable experience, and you’d think the extravagance of attending it would be enough. But actually, it was only the beginning of a long weekend of visiting beautiful gardens in England. I was completely spoiled!

After the show in London, we went off to Essex to visit the great gardens of Beth Chatto, one of my (many) gardening heroes. Since our time was limited, we decided to stay in Essex and visit some more gardens in the area. Each was unique and different, and each impressed me: the arid, hilltop garden at RHS Hyde Hall Gardens, the perfectly maintained nursery garden of Glen Chantry, and the wild and romantic Gibberd Gardens. We finished off with the “mother of all gardens”, the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew back in London.

The first garden on the tour was Glen Chantry. Owners Wol and Sue Staines have been developing this garden since 1976, along with a nursery for perennials. The site is 3acres, slightly sloping, and the design is informal. The majority of the garden is taken up by large borders chockfull of plants - it looks and feels like the perfect English garden. The flawless colour coordination was really noticeable - no plant was just placed somewhere to fill an empty spot.
One of the features of the garden is a sequence of ponds and streams that that runs through the site, which provides habitat for moisture loving plants. I particularly noticed some amazing specimens of Carex "Bowles Golden" grass, which made the one in my old garden look like a poor excuse for a plant.
Lastly, there is also a huge rock garden at the front of the house with what seems like hundreds of miniature plants many of which were blooming during our end of May visit.

Glen Chantry is first and foremost a plants garden. If you want to see what a plant looks like when grown to perfection, this is the place go. The colour and foliage coordination was also beautiful. And as a gardener, I was also marveling at the impeccable state of the whole site - I'm not sure how much help the owners have, but every bed was perfectly edged, every space perfectly balanced with plants and there was not a weed in site. A beautiful garden, but if you want to visit, this year is your last chance. The owners will be closing the garden and nursery at the end of the year, while still carrying on with "serious gardening" privately.