Words from the wise: Jenny Cooper
/Feeling rich with the fabulous, informative interview answers that Jenny provided but unable to squeeze it all into my Stuff column, we decided to share the entire, un edited version below.
Enjoy. There is so very much to learn here for gardeners of any level.
JAD: Before you bought the land and built the Blue House and garden, what was your previous gardening experience?
JC: My previous gardens were town gardens, with fences, endless free water, established trees, around 800 sq. metres. I took those things for granted, it was not until I found myself without them that I really had to sit up and take notice.
I used to mulch and feed to the max, 6 inches of beautiful homemade compost every year, the garden beds would eventually rise up out of the ground and tumble forward onto the lawn there was so much mulch.
JAD: What has the timeline been in terms of years from purchase, building up to the garden I see today?
Also, how big is the property?
JC: We are 4600 m2, just over an acre. Average 650 mm rain per year.
We bought the land mid 2013, and moved into new house late 2014. The very first thing we did, before a fence went up or a spade went into the ground, was build a big 3 bay compost bin. Next we planted perimeter trees. We did the tree planting wrong, but that learning came later.
Originally a sheep paddock, with wire fences, there was a hedge along the eastern side for shelter. However we didn’t know how strong the nor’wester was in Amberley. That wind was a shock and sometimes in the early years I regretted moving out here.
The oldest trees are 8 years old, we had to choose early on whether to keep the view or a have a garden, because of the wind. So about 7 years ago I put in seven large mixed species wind breaks, fanning out across the whole property. These windbreaks and what they taught me are a story in themselves. They consisted of a mixture of tiny (4 inch high) mixed natives. We had learnt that much, plant tiny!
Those windbreaks romped away and now they are turning into mature trees.
Each year, as our shelter increases, I remove another windbreak (they were designed to be temporary) and add another bit of garden in its place.
JAD: You have spoken about your inspirations from international gardens and designers. How would you describe the style that you seek to create visually? What do you personally value in your garden in terms of atmosphere, function and beauty?
JC: Goodness that is a big question! Stand back, everybody:
Yes I get a HUGE amount of inspiration from other gardeners, and that happened accidentally. When we arrived out here I had a heap of gardening techniques and a palette of (mostly shade loving) plants that had worked really well for me, but soon realised they weren’t going to work out here.
To start each area I used to hand dig, removing the extremely vigorous paddock grasses, then work in compost, mulch with compost, water, stake etc. It was impossible, back breaking, and there was only a tiny spring or autumn window when the ground was not too wet or too dry and could be worked. Things got blown or burnt to pieces (we had no shelter, not a single tree, except the hedge) and all the compost made everything lush and soft. I bought in mushroom compost as I couldn’t make enough compost myself, and anything sawdust based just blew away.
In those early years I accidentally mulched half of Amberley with zoom grow.
The old way was exhausting and unrewarding. And yet I was vaguely aware of other gardens that survived in these harsh conditions. So began a journey which I am still on, and which is one of the most enjoyable and valuable things the garden has given me.
Thank goodness for the internet, I say! Also the library.
I began to search desperately for anything about wind and dry. An article about Central Otago, say, would give me links to blogs about gravel gardens, research into dryland planting, I read horticultural research about water uptake, how to plant an effective windbreak, no dig methods, mycorrhizal fungi, organic and inorganic mulches, plant nutrition, bare rooting . . . one thing lead to another and remarkably different sources lead to very similar conclusions.
I learnt a HEAP of new techniques which revolutionised the way I plant and care for the garden. (See below) And on the way, I was swamped and seduced with the most wonderful photography of gardens from all over the world, which completely changed my aesthetic to a much looser, wilder look. Piet Oudolf, Olivier Filippi, James Golden (Federal Twist), Charles Dowding, Dan Pearson and NZ’s own Jo Wakelin. They all showed me in different ways that there were beautiful alternatives to the suburban garden I had traditionally created.
I am an illustrator, making decisions based on aesthetics all day. I think that 90% of what constitutes personal style is unconscious, these are decisions we are hardly aware of making. So what I say my style is, and what others can see it actually is, may be two different things.
My garden style was originally tidy, this large garden has forced me to relax and let more mess happen. But the word in my head constantly as I work is ‘calm’. That is what I need the garden to give me. Calm doesn’t mean me sitting down all the time, it means the sort of peacefulness I get from looking at happy well adapted plants that flow together, and under overarching trees. Trees are the real source of happiness, as they quietly grow in the background. I love to think of my trees 50 years in the future, happily growing and bringing shade to someone else.
Calm is about thoughtful, purposeful design, relaxed planting where the plants are not constantly bothered by the gardener but can express their natural character, where there is no disease, no flopping, no staking (which is forcing, I dislike forced plants). I love a dirty colour palette, in fact calm to me is a largely muted palette, with interesting leaf form. I like my plants to talk to one another, repeating themes and shapes. I like each plant and bed to flow into the next, but what constitutes ‘flow’ is hard to define. And amongst all the chaos, I do quite like a tidy edge.
I particularly love trees planted in gardens, there is something here from my childhood. Interestingly I find that my aesthetic (trees in flower beds; dirty colours; many small flowers rather than huge bright hero flowers) is echoed by everything I have learnt about dry gardening (if you can’t give plants water, give them shade; less colourful species plants have more genetic resilience; deadheading is time consuming, choose plants which need shearing once a year rather than deadheading). So the aesthetic and the dry garden learning bounce off one another.
I plant for the light, as most of the garden is north of the house, so the sunlight falls through the garden, illuminating it. We use large grasses, and airy forms, which pick up the light. A plant you can see through, rather than a big blob, is lovely. But I like a blob plant as well, in contrast.
Being a watercolourist (that sounds posh!) I am drawn to plants with graduated colour, soft washes of colour, blushes of purple and red, and many shades of the same colour. Primary colours I don’t love . . . lithodora, red dahlias, and bright pinks don’t work here. Anything speckled, washed, blotched and dirty I am attracted to. And again, the aesthetic and the learning come together … I keep my plants slightly stressed, short of water and nutrients, and they give me warm purple and red tones in their leaves, by the end of the year everything is orange and brown and lovely.
But this is all a work in progress! It is what I aim for, not what has been achieved. Also it sounds a bit arrogant to say I like thoughtful design etc., some of this is a real mess, I realise this.
JAD: I am still learning from you, but can you briefly breakdown your goals of reducing watering needs and ....... I can't even think of the name of the concept you use for your bed prep and maintenance! Anyway, please describe as if to beginners :)
JC: These are some of the things I do for the non-watered part of the garden. These work in this particular good free draining soil which has its original undisturbed layers. If I were gardening on ‘developed’ land these techniques wouldn’t work. And this isn’t for everyone, but might help new gardeners, people with bare land and lots of it. Also people planting for future water shortages.
Plant small! Smaller the better esp. for trees. No $150 trees, if you can, buy $30 whips.
My perennials go into the soil at only a few inches tall. They are often smaller than the pieces of mulch, I have to mark them with a cane or I’d forget they were there, as the birds do flick the mulch everywhere.
Capture the youthful vigor of your plants.
Their early growth spurt needs to happen in your soil, not in a pot, so that they form the best root system they are capable of. If you can (autumn and winter planting) bare root your plants. Shake off the potting mix, it is an inert medium, it dries and wets at different rates from native soil, get rid of it. Spread out the roots and cut off girdling roots. Small plants cope better with bare rooting.You can plant in a slight depression, to help bring any water to the plant.
If a plant can form a tap root, get it into the soil ASAP, you only have one chance to get that root down into your soil. Pot grown plants can’t form tap roots easily.
Don’t install irrigation, it is quickly obsolete, encourages dependence in the gardener and the plant.
For new garden beds in lawn, we now don’t dig the soil apart from planting, just mulch heavily after spraying the lawn, or using cardboard to kill the lawn. So we plant directly into the lawn soil, without turning it. It also means our beds are firm and can be walked on.
Initially the baby plants live on the dead roots of the grass, which make excellent humus rich soil. Then the mulch begins to break down and feed the plants. No, it feeds the soil life, which feeds the plants in turn. In effect, I am growing soil, rather than plants. I no longer add any soil amendments to the planting hole, although that really went against the grain initially.
Now it is second nature and very freeing. Intact healthy soil contains mycorrhizal fungi which form symbiotic relationships with most plants, bringing them water and nutrients in exchange for carbon. Once a plant has mycorrhizal input, it is much more resilient to drought.Avoid bare soil at all costs.
It never occurs in nature, bare soil is a wound which Mother Nature will quickly cover over with weeds. Out here I use ramial woodchip (a whole living tree mulched up, leaves and all) not bark (which inhibits decay and fungal growth). Woodchip encourages the mycorrhizal fungi, but we also use river stones, pine needles, grass clippings, anything to cover the soil. It keeps in the moisture and stops the weeds. There is no way I could run this huge garden if I had to weed.Apart from the woodchip mulch, we give no food to the garden. No sheep pellets, no blood and bone, especially no artificial fertilizers (they inhibit the mycorrhiza). It is not necessary to be forever feeding plants, side dressings of this and that, foliar feeds, etc. If I plant the right plants, they will look after themselves. This is not true for the productive garden, this is where all our compost goes. Productive garden is also no dig, so easy!
The hardest thing to learn was to plant in zones.
We all think we do it, planting plants with similar needs together. But I really have to take this seriously. In a dry bed, one drooping plant is enough to make me put on the hose. Each year I am looking for plants in the wrong place, to either shift or give away. Putting the hose on dry loving salvias, sedum, helichrysum, bupleurum, baptisias, liatris, makes them soft, floppy and disease prone. So I remove the water hungry plant, and enjoy the dry lovers. My aim is to make most of the garden exist water free, with no rain, for 6 weeks in summer.Why this obsession with water?
Water out here is expensive, watering is time consuming. Also the Hurunui doesn’t need me chucking a million gallons of precious water on beds full of roses or whatever. And it is a challenge, which I really enjoy. Anyone can plant a garden in that much sought after, mythical ‘free draining moisture retentive’ soil. But sometimes, when you have a severe limiting factor, like dry, it makes you more creative, and more adventurous. I do love my green (watered) moisture loving plants, but time and time again I find myself, cup of tea in hand, wandering over to the dry gardens, just to see what is happening, and to check out my new, unusual, unfamiliar plants.
Recently I have been creating extreme dry gardens were the lawn has completely failed, with ‘weeds’ such as echium, sumac, melianthus major, teasels, along with aloe, yucca, succulents, just to see how robust I can make a garden. I love these spare forms, they become almost architectural in the dry, and are upright and strong.
The dry conditions limits the rampant behaviour of vigorous plants. It is all a big experiment, every week I learn something new. Many dry lovers, for example, are allelopathic, in effect introducing toxins into the soil to inhibit other plants. This includes many aromatic Mediterranean plants. Hence the characteristic mounding shapes of many dry lovers (lavender, rosemary, thymes, ballota, cistus, rock roses, helichrysum italicum) which claim their ground beautifully. These plants I now give more space to, and that was a revelation, that everything didn’t have to be jumbled together in cottage garden or prairie style.
The garden is a bit of a jumbled mess as different experiments work out (or don’t). Gravel gardens, bog gardens, it is still all a bit complicated, but it will settle down as some plants thrive and others dwindle, the garden will simplify itself eventually. It is still a really young garden. I look at my plants most days and they tell me what they need, the clues are all there if you look for them.
I’m making this all sound like a lot of hard work, do this, don’t do that. And there is a HEAP more stuff I could say to new gardeners, I do feel for young people and first home owners, especially trying to create a garden on the rotten soil we give them in new developments (that is an interesting subject for a blog). There is a lot to learn, which makes gardening endlessly interesting. Recently we lost two big precious trees to phytopthera, and are about to lose another. I am going to do a big research blitz into this disease to try to prevent any more loss. Fun!
“As for why I love gardening, there are so many reasons...
I love the planning (my best work is done at night when I mull over problems and have many eureka moments) I love a good design decision when I have to be honest that something isn’t working, and then come up with a better solution. I love the plants themselves, they are old and new friends. I love the physical labour, it brings happiness and better sleep and mental calm. But you’ll know all this yourself.”
Lastly, how would people book to visit and what is the price per person?
We are open from November until April, by appointment only. Contact Jenny Cooper by text 021 258 9511, or via our website Blue House Amberley.
I try to answer quickly but am often in the garden.
To read the feature on this garden, see more images and a gentle film at dusk click below.
