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INTRODUCTION
It began as a seed of an idea one Sunday morning. What were we supposed to do with our garden? Pave it, deck it, let it grow madly? Or we could step outside and try to take it on. We’d only acquired the place to begin with to let three young boys run wild. But if the nettles grew much higher we’d lose them. So, gardening...
We had once grown a bamboo plant in a tub and a cactus, which had refused to die, in a pot. Unlike the aloes we’d travelled back with from IKEA: a blue plastic bag full of green spiky arms that we’d arranged on the balcony of our first flat to deter the two-year-old from jumping off. They turned to mush in the frost.
All of which in no way prepared us for what happened next. Because after a lifetime spent avoiding anything beyond the cutlery drawer that called itself a fork, we struggled out of bed and got stuck in. We’ve been out there ever since, with varying degrees of success, learning hard lessons along the way and wondering why no one told us a) how to do this and b) how good it made you feel.
Five years on and much has changed. The garden is ragged, colourful and still grows wild, but at least we know what’s what and how to nurture it, if we can find it. Although we’re still not sure how to prune properly. Our boys are bigger and spend too long stuck inside on the computer. Their garden is increasingly ours now. But are screens the future? We think not. Which is why you’re holding this magazine, not Googling it.
Because there’s something about connecting with nature that makes life better. Which means rakesprogress is as much a snapshot of the world beyond your window as it is a guide to the tricky business of growing stuff. Flick through these pages and, of course, you’ll see gardens, plants and flowers, but you’ll also find photography, bees, tools, craft, veg, art, architecture, sheds, clothes, jam and, of course, rhubarb. Even if you never pick up a rake, if you want an antidote to the mad whirl of digital, there is something here for you.
Whether you are photographing war gardens or sowing tomatoes, designing clothes in a garden studio or fixing stuff in a shed, gardens are places to grow. As the marvellously direct fashion designer Nigel Cabourn told us when we interviewed him in his garden in Gosforth, ‘What you’ve done to me today is make me realise how f***ing important this garden is to me! It’s obviously influenced me without me realising it.’ We know exactly how he feels. This is issue one of rakesprogress. We hope you enjoy it and grow with us.
The Editors
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INTRODUCTION
we remember the first time we glimpsed Derek Jarman’s garden, crunching across the shingle towards his black-clapboarded cottage on Dungeness beach. It was a revelation, an unlikely Eden as his friend Howard Sooley puts it elsewhere in this issue.
A filmmaker, an artist, a breaker of taboos and a lifelong gardener, Jarman first set eyes on Prospect Cottage 30 years ago. When we bumped into it he had long since gone (he died in 1994) but his presence was apparent in the sheer imagination of his vision. The sea kale, the wild poppies, the fennel, the flint circles, the scrap-metal sculptures and the driftwood dolmens. Absolute proof that you don’t have to have borders or boundaries, grass or even soil to call yourself a gardener. Shingle and the horizon will do.
Which pretty much sums up rakesprogress. And that is why in this, our second issue, we have, of course, gardeners and gardens, plants and flowers, but we also have makers of felt seed pods, war photography captured on leaves, bonsai masters, hop pickers, mushroom foragers, Gaza beekeepers, opium growers from Afghanistan and daring Chinese farmers who build DIY aircraft out of junk in their back yards. All of which gives us a slightly different, dare we say rakish, take on gardens, plants and flowers.
When we launched in the summer we promised to match the seasons, so, naturally being autumn, this is our harvest issue. And our photographers have delivered a bumper crop of images. Josh Shinner’s scrapbook captures the rapid change in the landscape around his Yorkshire home when the industrial agro contractors move in. Kevin Mackintosh’s painterly harvest will draw your gaze to squashes, pumpkins and figs as you’ve rarely seen them before and William Bunce shows us misshapen vegetables worthy of a plinth at the Tate.
But it’s Charles Fréger’s extraordinary portraits of the Japanese Yokai, the ancient spirits of the archipelago who appear at festivals to mark the changing of the seasons, that make us stop and stare. Figment of folklore they may be - or more prosaically a local in a costume - but in Fréger’s hands they come to life to mark the slow but sure passing of the year.
Slow is the operative word. And rakesprogress is here, in part, to give you an excuse to pause. So enter the world beyond your window: chop wood, pick mushrooms, plant a border, set light to a bonfire, identify the trees above your head, save some seeds from your allotment for next year... and read this magazine. Slowly. We hope you’ll enjoy it. Then, like our Chinese amateur aeronauts, let your imagination take flight. There’s still time to make an unlikely Eden.
INTRODUCTION
There’s an ash tree outside our window that we once tried to tame. Its thickset trunk divides about 15ft from the ground, boughs snake off in three directions – the one that heads horizontally across the garden being the perfect height for the kids’ rope swing. Branches grow sinuously up and out, big branches spawn small branches which then turn into twigs that sub-divide hundreds of times before petering out to gnarled knuckles in the sky. In summer its canopy rustles like straw and hides a perfect perch for the pigeons taking aim at the table on our terrace – and cover for those sitting below – in autumn it dumps at least 20 garden bags of purple brown leaves in under a week and in winter it looks like an umbrella brusquely blown inside out. It must be 150 years old.
Winter is best. Like tracery against the clouds, our ash skeleton gives us something to look at well into spring, before its leaves start to arrive long after the rest of the competition has blossomed. Which we think is the way with all ash trees although perhaps ours is it a late developer. But don’t the best things come to those who wait?
The artist David Nash has waited 40 years for the saplings he planted in 1977 to become the living sculpture he has brought into life in a wood in north Wales. The whips he prodded and pruned, and persuaded to grow have morphed into a twisting ash dome that he tends to this day. Elsewhere in this issue he tells us about this extraordinary artwork, the result of his vision and skill and fluency working with wood. But it is also a triumph of patience and long-term planning.
Trees take their time. Which is what we like to do at rakesprogress, where taking your time is the order of the day, as the writer Carl Honoré, the godfather of the Slow movement, reminds us on page 74. Perhaps that’s why this issue is packed with trees. From planting trees to pruning trees, to bonsai in Jerusalem, to China’s disappearing trees to Japan’s treehouse master, and, of course, David Nash’s Ash Dome in Wales, we have sown a small forest of trees, without ever really meaning to.
But there’s more, too. We’ve houseplants and florists, birdsong and bothies, Ikebana and drystone walls and an interview with Piet Oudolf, the man behind the High Line in New York and the Oudolf Field in Somerset, where he thinks his garden looks best in winter. Have a look at the spectacular pictures on page 60 – you won’t disagree.
Gardeners have always known to savour the seasons, so we hope you enjoy this our winter issue. It is of course the perfect time of year to prune the trees and once these pages are at the printers that’s what we will do. But not the ash. We gave up on that ages ago. These days we like it just the way it is.
The Editors
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INTRODUCTION
WHEN DID YOU FIRST NOTICE SPRING? Not the first signs of spring, which is a different thing altogether and could involve any number of answers: some say snowdrops, some say daffodils, others point to celandines in the hedgerows and wafts of wild garlic in the woods, or primroses unfolding underneath the apple trees. The Met Office will tell you it starts on 1 April, astronomers have the cast-iron certainty of a spring equinox to cling to, but for us, it’s even more scientific than that. It is when we see the pure white blossom on our cherry tree. That’s spring, right there outside the window, and the birdsong, even on the murkiest morning with Tupperware skies, is never going to let you forget it. Louder and brighter, and more vibrant, it grows throughout April into May, and beyond.
But when did you first really notice spring? The television playwright Dennis Potter had terminal cancer when he gave an interview about living through his dying days. He talked – as he smoked! – about noticing spring with an extraordinary vividness, how the intensity of the colours and the smells had hit him full square in the face, engaging every sense, now that he knew that he would never see spring again. It was, in his memorable phrase, the ‘blossomest blossom’ that he had ever seen. Of course, you don’t need to be seizing the moment because it’s your last to appreciate spring. But the point is well made. When you open your eyes to what’s going on out there, spring is a revelation. How madly colourful can it get? How much more beautiful does it look? How sweet can it smell? Where has all this sunlight been? And in this issue of rakesprogress we hope to offer you all that and more. Because we have daffodils and blossom, of course, and an A to Z of spring. And even four pages of garlic. But we have so much more, an abundant and sensory overload that may not be able to compete with what’s going on outside, but we think comes pretty close. Flick through these pages and you’ll find punk gardeners, greenhouse hunters, allotment authors, flower artists, root weavers, rare orchids, wild shepherds, a poet in his shed, and the brick miners of Burkina Faso.
When we started rakesprogress last summer we asked you to grow with us, and now three issues later we can look back and see how far we’ve come. What began on the kitchen table is now coming to you from a garden shed and next month we will be taking it to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show to make our summer issue. Come and see us if you are there – or get in touch. As we head into summer, we want to take the magazine to another level and if you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoy making it, we need your help. But for now, this
rakesprogress, volume 4, marks the end of our first full year. New beginnings, new issue. Spring has sprung.
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INTRODUCTION
WHAT IS IT ABOUT A SECRET GARDEN THAT IS SO SEDUCTIVE ? The children’s book of the same name may not bear too much re-reading – not if you try to read it to three young boys in quick succession, as we know to our cost – but the idea at the heart of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Edwardian classic is as powerful as the thought of a promised land, with its hint of a hidden Eden you are yet to discover. But a secret garden also promises something else, that in its own way is equally compelling – the sense of a sanctuary to which you can escape and grow.
This issue is full of secret gardens. We found one when we took the rakesprogress shed to Chelsea for the world’s biggest flower show. With 165,000 people trekking through the gates of what is basically a small London park you’d think very little could remain hidden, but we found our secret spot among the trees. The one part of the Chelsea site that had never been used in 104 years. Glimpse it for yourself on page 4.
Elsewhere in the issue garden maker Darren Hawkes describes how his gold-medal winning design at Chelsea was inspired by his 11-year-old daughter’s drawing of a secret garden, complete with a door and high hedge as forbidding as any garden wall. And Dan Pearson on page 102 writes about the gardens of his childhood, where he first got stuck into the soil – and learned to love escaping the frenzy of the outside world, where two hours spent digging or planting or weeding easily turns into four or five. This is the idea of the garden as a sanctuary.
But on another level some gardens remain secret because you never see them. Days before we packed up our shed and headed to Chelsea, we found ourselves lost in a garden we didn’t even know existed. The shoe designer Christian Louboutin may be known around the world as the man behind some of the most famous high heels in fashion, but he also harbours a yen for gardening that is far removed from the flash, bang, wallop of the catwalk. Over 30 years he has helped create a spectacle as extraordinary – and as fantastic – as any of his red-soled shoes. But now his secret is out and you can judge it for yourself on page 54.
Our secret garden, though, remains in our mind. It’s the garden we will one day create. All we need is the time and the money and the space to make it happen. But for the moment – honestly, just for the moment – it remains in our imagination, which is, perhaps, the best place to let secret gardens grow.
INTRODUCTION
It’s dark, chilly and feels like winter, so what better time to retreat indoors with your favourite magazine? At rakesprogress, we resent the cold. It spells the end of autumn and the death of hope. How long did we hang on to the prospect of one last blast of an Indian summer? Now gone. All that is left is an impatient wait for spring. But since we’re stuck with short days and long nights, we might as well make the most of the season and harvest what autumn has left us, to store and keep. At least, until the snowdrops start.
Showing us the way in this issue we have Rebecca Louise Law, one of the UK’s leading installation artists who knows the beauty of cut flowers lies not just in the blowsy bounty to be found at full bloom, but also in their after-life. Her latest work is inspired by the garlands of dried flowers used in the funerary rites of the ancient Egyptians. You can read about her life and art in a profile written by Christopher Woodward, director of London’s Garden Museum, and hear what she has to say about her relationship with flowers — both dead and alive — on our back page, where she answers all the questions we’ve ever wanted to ask,such as: how do you hang a million flowers?
Elsewhere, the author John Lewis-Stempel writes about the passion for gardening that flowered in the trenches — of all places — during the First World War (page 114). We know, of course, of the symbolic power of the Flanders poppy but we had no idea how horticulture helped keep men sane on the frontline. Soldiers clung to the natural world with watering cans, vases fashioned out of shell cases and a handful of scavenged seeds, while knee deep in the maelstrom of mud and madness that was the Western Front. The ultimate proof, perhaps, that plants, like people, have a will to survive even in the bleakest of conditions.
James Basson is a garden designer who specialises in tough terrain. He is also — to some — a controversial winner of Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea golds. Although not in our book. In these pages, he is a hero, and in our interview on page 96, he talks about the pleasure to be found in forbidding landscapes and his love of the plants that flourish there. And, in a very different way, another gold-medal-winning designer, Luciano Giubbilei reveals what can be created from unpromising beginnings, when he visits the gardens of La Foce in Tuscany, an Italian masterpiece that was created less than a hundred years ago out of fields of dust and rock.
But that’s just the start of it. In these pages you’ll also find: indoor gardens and honesty sheds, the ancient Indian city of perfume and America’s original land artist Agnes Denes, freediving grandmothers and catwalk florists, plus stick weavers, kokedama, kosher cooks and Milton Keynes. Quite a crop we think you’ll agree.
All of which will, hopefully, keep you going until those snowdrops appear. For us, we have the small matter of the rakesprogress pop-up to attend to — our mission to put flowers back into the heart of Covent Garden at No.13 Floral Street. We’ll be there before, during and after Christmas. Come and see us while you can. Otherwise, hold on! Like a hardy perennial, we’ll return come the spring.
THE EDITORS
What do we mean by landscape? Is it the landscape of the artist, the photographer, the architect, the traveller or the gardener? Because a landscape can be many things to many people. It can be a canvas, a format, a medium, a habitat, a terrain you journey across or try to shape and tame (‘hard landscaping’). It can even be all in the mind.
When we first dreamt up the magazine you are holding we didn’t dwell on landscapes. It was, after all, a magazine about gardens, plants and flowers. But we quickly realised you can’t have one without the other, and in this issue landscape has moved centre stage. We have the landscape of the artist Lucy May Schofield who finds her inspiration lying on the Northumberland moors under the stars. We have the landscape of the Cumbrian fells where Rob and Harriet Fraser keep a watch on seven chosen trees. We have the landscape of the Scandinavian larch woods that the Forest Finns call home.
We are also introduced to the ‘interzones’ between the city and the countryside, the favourite landscape of novelist and committed walker Will Self, who reminds us that we all construct landscapes in our heads. He calls it psychogeography. And, of course, we have the landscapes of the gardener, courtesy of leading French paysagiste — or landscape gardener — Louis Benech, who reminds us that gardens are artificial, no matter how natural or beautiful they appear. Recreations of landscapes lost, imagined or desired. Dots, not blots, on the landscape we call home. It’s extraordinary how quickly your sense of smell reminds you of home. According to Oscar-nominated actor – and now fragrance maker – Richard E Grant the shortest synaptic leap in the brain is from smell to memory. When he arrives back in his English garden from Hollywood the first thing he does is mow the lawn. Even in winter. Because nothing makes him feel more at home than the smell of cut grass. And nothing transports him back to his childhood home in southern Africa quicker than a sniff of gardenia. Fifty years – and 8,000 miles – in a nano-second. If only, he says, he could discover how to extract the scent. Read our interview with the world’s only Oscar-nominated perfumer on page 26.
Where does your favourite fragrance take you? For us it’s either the smell of the earth in East Africa after the rain, both warm and pungent, and dusted with the powdered scent of oleander. Or the citrus swish of leylandii branches, filling the nose and scouring the face as we plunged deeper into a grandparents’ border looking for yet another ball. But, unlike the ball, those places aren’t lost. They are still there, waiting to be unlocked, in the landscape of our mind.
CURRENT ISSUE
INTRODUCTION
As a young girl, I lived in Africa with my brothers and sisters, but our family home — where we stayed when we came back to England — was in Cornwall. Every summer, when we visited, we would head to the standing stones on top of St Breock Downs to see Grandad’s stone, as we knew it, or Men Gurta (the waiting stone). Nearly 16 feet high and composed of local shale with veins of feldspar, the lichen-covered, faceted rock has seams like wounds in which small coins can be wedged. The standing stones are easily reached on foot although, in winter, the ground is waterlogged, and boots squelch and slip on the paths. There are wind turbines up there, too, now — great kinetic sculptures whose rhythmic music adds a soundtrack to the landscape.
As children, we would lay offerings at the stone — wild flowers picked from the path, a posy of heather or, sometimes, if we were lucky, a coin. Eventually, my family returned to England for good and, one by one, we grew up and moved away. Two winters ago, when my father was dying, I took my three boys up there, armed with coins. We pushed the coins into the stone’s crevices, and I screwed up my eyes and willed the gods to change their minds so that Dad could find a way to carry on living.
For most people driving past, these granite rocks jutting out of the earth are just another part of the Cornish scenery. Typically dating from the Bronze Age and occurring all over Britain, these menhirs, orthostats or liths are large vertical stones placed in the landscape by man. They were often places to meet or worship, magical places. Bronze-age relics they may be, but they are also monuments to a millennia of human wishes and prayers.
I was reminded of Men Gurta by the haunting pictures of standing stones we feature in this issue. Shot by photographer Olin Brannigan, these great solid slabs stand to attention in County Mayo, Ireland, preparing to salute spring for, approximately, the 4,000th time. The natural world adheres to its eternal rhythm — new life, regeneration, decay — come what may. Elsewhere in this issue, we are reminded of nature’s dizzying complexity and interdependence in the mycorrhizzal web that lies beneath our feet whenever we walk in the woods — a salutary reminder that no one species can survive without another. From the Vanishing Point flower farm in upstate New York to the Suffolk home of designer Roland Mouret, we find common threads that connect us with the land and those who have come before us. We feel the weight of history on Victoria Fritz’s spade as she becomes the guardian of a garden once owned by Austen Chamberlain, who brokered post-war peace while ‘debt and doubt pulled at the threads of the country’s tailcoats, and poverty lacerated the land’. We also dig below the surface of the floriculture industry and discover how, over time, it has lost sight of its natural roots, and learn how a growing movement is advocating much needed change and a lower carbon footprint.
Nature is resilient, with an amazing capacity to regenerate and adapt. So perhaps we should take more lessons from it when we are seeking answers — and listen to the wind and rain, slow down, find a more natural rhythm. On that windswept moor near St Breock Downs, Grandad’s stone with its curves and shadows, still resonates with a strength — perhaps from all the wishes it holds. Press against its cold, wet surface and you’ll find a reason to remember the scale of things. In these stones’ poised stillness, we sense our fragility and nature’s wisdom. Time may be in short supply, but it stands still here. It could wait for another 4,000 years.
VICTORIA GAIGER (Editor)
INTRODUCTION
At first, it sounded like incarceration — locked down — and a deadly one at that, with the terrifying injunction to stay at home to save lives. The very real implications were too hard to ignore, not just the headlines and the uncertainty, but the rising levels of anxiety as real as the sound of the sirens
that punctured the eerie silence hanging over our empty suburban streets. It was weird and unsettling. Touching was verboten, grandparents were sent into exile. Daily death tolls doubled and, with them, our sense of mortality.
But then, little by little, the mood changed. Day after day, the sun shone with surprising warmth, the earth stirred and the trees began to reveal themselves — showing off the ‘blossomest blossom’ (a phrase coined by a dying Dennis Potter) there had ever been. Suddenly, our senses were heightened. Perhaps it was the absence of traffic, the lack of contrails around the Biggin Hill stack, but the sky was clearer, the air sweeter, the grass greener, and into the space left behind by human activity stepped nature.
It was visceral. As the usual whirr of a busy day slowed, the volume outside was turned up. Birdsong filled the air, bluebells ran riot under the apple trees, the wisteria bloomed. We found nests full of eggs, cleared nettles, planted seeds. Our lives became entwined with nature’s rhythm. As Dan Pearson tells us in this issue, the Japanese divide their year into 72 micro-seasons, one for every five days, each with its own wonderfully descriptive name. We think we now know why.
During our bitter-sweet coronavirus spring, imperceptible changes suddenly became perceptible for the first time: the colour and shapes of tulips as they go over; the tiny tendrils of a new sweet-pea shoot; the families of frogs; the back-lit, vivid green of the robinia tree as it burst into life. Even our old ash tree, coming into leaf last as always, slowly threw a welcome shade across the terrace. Animals ventured out too: fox cubs from under the compost heap, a pheasant in our neighbours’ garden, and seagulls in suburbia scavenging for waste on the overflowing tips. Did they know more than we realised? Research now suggests that in 2020 there was a drop in seismic noise — the hum of vibrations on the Earth’s crust — as transport networks and industry ground to a halt.
Our relationship with our natural surroundings creates a sense of place, identity and belonging. And if this strange year has taught us anything, it’s that we need to live in a more holistic way: to design urban green spaces, to rewild, to make use of pockets of unused land, and to create wildlife corridors where nature can continue to feel safe and untouched.
At rakesprogress, we’re still adjusting to this new world order, but, as you can see, the magazine is still here, more profuse in pages — and we’d like to think — better than ever. So, here is volume 12, a bumper issue to make up for its absence this summer. It’s not a lockdown issue, but it is filled with some of the lessons learned over the last six months. We look at birdsong, deserted playgrounds and lockdown flowers. We talk to the forensic scientist who solves crimes using her knowledge of pollen and botany. We meet Masami-Charlotte Lavault, who bravely set up Paris’ first flower farm in an old graveyard. We ask Dan Pearson about his 20-year involvement with the Tokachi Millennium Forest, and discover how he fell in love with Japan and the Japanese sensitivity to nature. There is magic in this attention to detail, to the forensic examination of nature.
As we go to print, the word ‘lockdown’ is in the air again. Wherever you are, we hope you are able, in some small way, to enjoy the silence and the stillness, and take notice of the seasons changing every five days. Even just watching nature is a healing process. Engaging with it really can help. We hope that this magazine will inspire or bring comfort as we share our take on the strangest year of our lives — not locked down, more opened up, in the most revealing way. •
