Jardin Botanique Alpin "Flore-Alpe", Champex, Switzerland

Since I was already on the topic of rock gardens in the last post, I thought I would continue the theme with the greatest rock garden I have ever visited: Le Jardin Botanique Alpin, in Champex, Switzerland.

“Huh?”, you may ask. I would guess that not a lot of people have heard of this garden, which is a real pity. We accidentally stumbled upon it on a hiking trip to Switzerland a few years ago and I was completely blown away. So much so that on our trip to the Alps this year, we absolutely had to hike for a full day there and a full day back to see it again.
A quick disclaimer before I begin: I don’t really like rock gardens. In most cases, rock gardens are created to grow alpine plants in places where alpine plants really don’t want to grow. More often than not, the result is a few microscopic plants, evenly spaced and completely lost in a sea of rock and gravel. Even worse, these “alpine” gardens are frequently found in flat suburban gardens or parks, hundreds of miles away from any hills or mountains. It’s not surprising then that results are usually artificial and tacky, and no matter how well done, they just don’t feel right. While the plants may be interesting and beautiful, visually one can’t get around the fact that the rock garden just doesn’t belong.
Le Jardin Alpine doesn’t have any of these problems. Located in the heart of the Swiss Alps, it benefits from a naturally rocky, sloped site with a spectacular backdrop of snow-capped mountains and pine forests on one side, and Champex lake on the other side. There is even a natural spring at the top of the site, which is channeled through meandering streams and waterfalls to several small ponds below. Unfair advantage, I know. But in truth, this is the only place where a rock garden actually belongs.
The garden grows an incredible 3000 species of plants. To put that into perspective, the Royal Botanical Garden in Hamilton, Ontario grows 1100 species of plants on an area about 50 times bigger (counting landscaped area only). However, in my opinion, the best part of the garden is how the planting is done. Plants at Le Jardin Alpin are not what one has come to expect from the standard, controlled rock garden. Instead, they come in billowing masses, spilling over each other in the beds, between cracks in the paths and on the side of streams. If you’re a plant enthusiast, you can probably spend a few hours just examining the incredibly diverse flora in a small corner of the garden.
It’s so refreshing to see that rock garden plants can grow together, and don’t have some sort of aversion to neighbors which requires them to be kept a foot apart. I think it also better reflects the true nature of rock garden plants – in their natural environment, they are not as delicate as we think. In most cases, many plants will be found elbowing each other for room in a small crack with favorable growing conditions.
Although the garden is quite small, it has a great feeling of discovery, even after walking around it several times. All the paths are relatively narrow, with many changes in level, which means you can’t rush through the garden (though I can't imagine anyone wanting to!). They are laid out informally, and meander between the lush plantings, along streams and over miniature stone bridges.
One more neat thing about Le Jardin Alpin is that you can stay overnight in the small chalet in the garden, which we did this year. It’s not very fancy and could use some upkeep, but it’s well worth it for a chance to enjoy the garden all by yourself. Watching a sunset over glowing grasses with Champex lake as the backdrop was definitely something I won’t soon forget.

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.

Dijon, France

Are there any ugly parts of France? We have now visited several regions, and it seems like the whole country is just soaked in charm, both from the scenic landscape and the easy living. Dijon is no different. The whole Burgundy region is set in gently rolling countryside, with one impossibly picturesque small village after another. You could easily spend a few weeks just visiting the areas around Dijon, enjoying the little stone houses, the gardens and of course the not too shabby food and wine.
I was trying to figure out what is so special about the French charm. Other places in Europe are beautiful, but there’s a unique feeling in France. It’s hard to describe, but I think it comes from the way everything appears effortless. They’re not trying to have the cutest village in the area, it just is. Things aren't contrived, and they're not perfectly maintained either. The stone houses are there because that's the local material. Everything is a little worn around the edges, the window shutters aren’t perfectly straight, the wood is starting to rot and the paint is peeling. That 'antique' look designers use all sorts of tricks to achieve just seems to happen naturally. Plantings don’t appear to be very planned either, but when your front porch weed is lavender and your door is partially obscured by an old rose, why worry? You can tell the really keen gardeners because they went through the effort of plunking down a few geraniums in old, chipped pots and voila, charm is overflowing! A little neglect and the laissez-faire attitude are all part of the French charm, and maybe its essence.
The only actual planned garden we went to was part of a castle and I'm very embarrassed but I don't remember the name the name of it. They're a dime a dozen in the region, and since we only saw two (one without a garden), I'm really not really sure how it compares to the rest. The gardens were of course formal, and perhaps not as laissez-faire as the village gardens. Although I've never been a huge fan of formal castle gardens with the standard low hedges enclosing sad looking roses, this one wasn't bad and felt like it suited the castle. The long water feature bisecting the garden was used to good effect.
Overall, Dijon is a beautiful region and I wish we could have had weeks, not days, to explore and enjoy it. Alas, after a long weekend it was already time to trek back to work.

Life of a cherry

Every week when we go to our CSA farm to pick up our produce, we pass through the cherry orchard on the way to the main veggie field. When the cherry trees started to bud out in the spring, I decided to start taking pictures every week to track the life cycle of the cherries. I have always been amazed by how trees transform from bare branches in the spring to masses of green leaves and ripe fruit in the summer. Even though I took a lot of pictures to document every stage of the process, it doesn’t seem any less amazing or mysterious.

Eat your veggies!

A few months ago I did a post on our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) farm, which is one of the best things we have discovered in our little town of Leuven. CSA's are definitely not a uniquely Belgian phenomenon - the concept originally started in Germany, and the US is now the frontrunner with the most farms. The idea is that members buy into the farm at the beginning of the year, and then share all produce throughout the year. We're not sure how many of these exist in Belgium, but we've been told not very many, so we're very lucky to be only 10 minutes by bike from one of them.

The productivity of the farm has been hugely impressive. We've been getting fresh salad greens since March, and at this time of the year we can barely keep up. Here's this week's haul (our farm is pick-your-own, many others deliver boxes every week):
- two different types of lettuce
- kohlrabi
- cabbage
- swiss chard
- radishes
- zucchini
- broccoli
- spinach
- dill

There are also sugar snap peas, but we still have some left over from last week, and new beans which we didn't have time to pick. And some late strawberries, although we've had our fill already. Oh, and the cherries we picked never made it home... Next week the new potatoes will be harvested already!

There are also chickens on the farm so we can buy fresh eggs, and last week we found out that the sheep that are grazing under the cherry trees, who we first met as little lambs in March, will be part of the offerings in the fall. Tom (our farmer) wants to keep a "pick your own" theme for that as well, though we're not quite sure how that's going to work yet.

Beth Chatto Gardens , Essex

For a gardener, Beth Chatto has achieved some incredible things. Her name is regularly included in the lists of most influential landscape designers of the 20th/21st century, she has lectured around the world, received 10 consecutive Gold Medals at Chelsea, and was bestowed the highest award by the Royal Horticultural Society, the Victoria Medal of Honour. Not bad for someone who has only ever gardened in her own backyard.

Now a pilgrimage site for thousands of gardeners, 50 years ago her 'backyard' (it's a few acres) was neglected land allowed to grow wild because the soil was deemed unsuitable for farming. Inspired by her husband’s interest in the origins of plants and their visits to many wild plant habitats, she set about transforming the garden. Given the challenges of the site, the most important principle she adopted was ‘right plant for the right place’. While this may not seem particularly revolutionary to us now, it was in her time, when everyone was growing the same standard roses, delphiniums and foxgloves anywhere and everywhere. This unique approach and the inspiring results brought her fame and recognition in the gardening world. Of course, she also wrote a few books along the way and started a nursery business.
Visiting the Beth Chatto Gardens was definitely the highlight of our garden trip to Essex. The gardens are impressive for many reasons, but especially because of the extreme range of natural habitats that exist in a relatively small area. The most famous section is probably the non-irrigated, dry gravel garden where a surprising variety of plants flourish, many of which I would have never thought could even survive such dry conditions. This area was actually a bit smaller than I expected (given that she's written a whole book dedicated to it), but not less amazing.
Past the gravel garden, the entrance to the garden proper is underneath a huge, ancient oak tree. From the hot, exposed gravel section, stepping underneath the shade of the tree and into the main garden area is like stepping into a green oasis. The garden runs along a natural valley where three large, interconnected ponds have been created. Everything is incredibly green and lush, with the ponds surrounded by large-leaved plants and bold grasses. This was my favourite area - I probably could have sat there for hours just staring.
If you continue past the last pond and a reservoir, you arrive at the woodland garden. Shaded by some impressive, very tall trees, the woodland garden floor is completely packed with plants, many of which I didn't know but all of which were thriving. I loved this area because it was more relaxed in character (less gardened) which fitted perfectly with its woodland setting . In between the woodland and water gardens there are also some more traditional garden beds, with many interesting plant selections and combinations.
Beth Chatto has had an impressive impact on the gardening world, and I don't think it's only because of her plant habitat philosophy. On top of being a dedicated plant lover, I think it's her artistic eye, so evident throughout the gardens, which has really set her apart from so many others.

Flanders Fields

A few weeks ago, poppies started coming up everywhere – on the side of the road, in neglected stone rubble piles behind buildings, and scattered across fields. It took me a little while to make the connection that we are in fact in Flanders, so these are the real Flanders poppies, rather than just the plastic Remembrance Day versions. It’s also a bit funny to see them now – I’m used to the plastic poppies coming out in November, so I was half expecting the real ones would as well.
On the way to work, I ride past several concrete-imprisoned city trees which are now surrounded by masses of cheery poppies – a much better alternative to the concrete, stones or compacted soil that usually fills these tree pits. Around one tree, there was a veritable meadow – poppies, yellow and white flowers, a lone dandelion, grasses, and a few other plants. I don’t know their names, but I think there must have been at least ten plant varieties in that tiny area. I’ll be curious to see how the mini-meadow will evolve over the summer.
Last weekend we also drove down to France, and the poppies there were spectacular. They completely covered the steep, rocky banks along the highway. They were even more amazing in the wheat fields – beautiful yellow ripening wheat against bright red poppies. We now have a ridiculous number of wheat and poppies photos.