On Tuesday 12 November, garden writer Clare Foster and photographer Andrew Montgomery join us to share the ground-breaking gardens revealed in their new book Pastoral Gardens, gardens that conjure up ideas of rural idyll while responding to the new reality of our changing climate (book tickets). One of the gardens featured in the book is Andrew Salter’s Barn Garden in Kent, shared in an exclusive extract below:
‘I wanted the garden to be immersive, like a moat. I had this vision of the barn floating through a sea of tall grasses and flowers’ – Andrew Salter
Defying tradition, Andrew Salter has determinedly followed a vision to make a garden that is idiosyncratic and intriguing. His garden-in-a-field might best be described as an interactive installation; a place of experimentation and intensive horticulture designed to connect its owner with his plants and the seasons. On this stage set, a simple wooden barn is surrounded by a square of dense, intricately planted garden, which is in turn enclosed within a meadow and orchard, with the countryside beyond. The scene feels like an illustration from a children’s book; the tall, narrow clapboard house marooned in a sea of tall, colourful plants that ebbs and flows throughout the year. You might surmise that Andrew has been gardening his whole life, but that’s not the case at all. A freelance special effects maker in the advertising industry, he suddenly and inexplicably felt a deep desire to learn about plants aged 29. ‘I was living in King’s Cross, working full-time, and I kept getting this sense that I needed to be working outside. I didn’t even know what a tulip looked like,’ he reflects.
Following his instinct, Andrew left London and moved to Whitstable on the Kent coast, then took a sabbatical and went to Japan to work on a rice farm and learn about permaculture. ‘It was autumn [fall], and all the ornamental grasses were out, and something clicked,’ says Andrew. ‘I knew that I had to go back to England and learn about plants.’ So, in 2006 he enrolled on a part-time horticulture course at Hadlow College. One of the pivotal things that happened during that time was his introduction to Great Dixter. ‘Everyone talked about Christopher Lloyd in such hallowed terms,’ he remembers. ‘We had all his books in the library, so I spent the entire winter reading them.’ He fell in love with Dixter without even seeing it, waiting the whole of that winter in anticipation before visiting when the gardens reopened in spring. ‘It was an epiphany,’ he says. ‘I went on my own and wandered around with my mouth open, swooning at everything I saw. It was deeper and more stimulating and inspiring than I could ever have imagined.’ After that first visit, he kept coming back, eventually plucking up courage to ask whether he could volunteer there.
Andrew was welcomed at Dixter with open arms, working under head gardener Fergus Garrett whenever his working schedule would allow – sometimes even turning down paid work to be there. The learning curve was exponential, and at last his curiosity about plants was being sated. Inevitably, in the end he wanted his own garden to play with, so in 2014 he bought a small wooden house in a rural hamlet near Canterbury. The extraordinary wooden barn had been built in 1985 as an architect’s studio. ‘At the time, the whole hamlet was a Steiner commune,’ explains Andrew. ‘One of the community here was an architect and he managed to get permission to knock down an existing decrepit barn next to the chapel and build another in exactly the same footprint in the middle of the field.’ At the time, Andrew was reading Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s 19th-century memoir, which documents the American intellectual’s experiences after separating himself from society and going to live alone in a simple cabin in the Massachusetts woods for two years, two months and two days. Thoreau rhapsodised about his experience, describing his intense interactions with nature: ‘Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself,’ he wrote.
‘I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms… Sometimes, in a summer morning, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house.’
Reading about Thoreau’s experience had a profound effect on Andrew, who was fascinated by the concept of isolation in nature. When he saw the barn standing on its own in the middle of the field, he knew he had to live here. ‘I had this elemental image of a simple domicile in tune with its surroundings,’ he says. ‘I instantly had a complete picture in my head of what it was going to be. I could see the house surrounded by plants.’ As soon as he took possession of the barn he started working on his vision, putting in a narrow deck all the way round the house, and then digging the borders by hand and surrounding them with a simple chestnut paling fence.
Taking three months off work, he toiled eight hours a day to skim the turf, remove stones and rubble, and dig in 10–15 tonnes (11–16½ tons) of mushroom compost. ‘I knew exactly how I wanted it to feel,’ says Andrew. ‘I wanted it to be immersive, like a moat. I had this vision of the barn floating through a sea of tall grasses and flowers.’ And in late summer and autumn, when the planting reaches its tallest point, this is exactly how it feels. The plants tower above you and crowd round you as you tiptoe along the decking, and looking out from inside the barn, you almost feel like you are within the planting. ‘We have a tendency to separate ourselves from the outside, to cut ourselves off from it, but here you’re part of it,’ says Andrew. ‘There’s something about the materials and the scale of this place that connects you more fully with the outside. It feels very intimate. I can be sitting in here, and the garden beckons me out. It’s always inviting me in. Gardening is all about seeing and observing, and I can do this from the house.’
Having learned about the contrasts of shape and form and colour from Fergus Garrett, Andrew knew the types of plants he wanted, including a rich mixture of shrubs, perennials, grasses and bulbs. He had never worked on a space this size, so he planted by instinct, acquiring more plants as time went on, often using different species or cultivars of the same plant. This, he says, satisfies his endless inquisitiveness about plants (as well as self-confessed avarice). ‘I would say that there’s something to be derived from minor deviations in detail when casting an eye through a garden, be those in form, colour, lifecycle or otherwise. This is especially true in a garden like mine where the land is rather flat and open, so topography, light levels, exposure and soil quality are not variable enough to bring about much diversity in plant growth. When the selections of a certain plant all differ a bit, it makes for a more nourishing and disarming spectacle, to my eye.’
Having developed a penchant for conifers at Great Dixter, he has planted multiple species of pine and cypress, which form the backbone of the garden in winter. ‘I use them to augment the plants around them, so the contrasts sing to me,’ he says, pointing out a Japanese acer next to a blue cypress – ‘a rule-breaker combination’ – and the quirky form of Cryptomeria japonica ‘Rasen-sugi’, which he describes as ‘like a cartoon character’. Other structural shrubs such as Sambucus nigra f. porphyrophylla ‘Black Tower’ are scattered through the planting, as well as ornamental grasses such as Calamagrostis brachytricha, Pennisetum macrourum and the dwarf pampas grass, Cortaderia selloana ‘Pumila’, which introduce gentle movement and a connection to the wild. Around this structure weaves an ever-changing tapestry of plants beginning with Galanthus ‘Atkinsii’ in February and followed by a succession of spring bulbs, roses such as deep crimson ‘Florence Mary Morse’ and then late-flowering perennials including veronicastrums, asters, Japanese anemones, cloud-like Koenigia alpina and towering Macleaya x kewensis ‘Flamingo’ (which is even taller and more vigorous than the more common M. cordata).
There is no rhyme or reason or fashion to Andrew’s planting choices. He has chosen plants from all over the world because he is attracted to their form or character, and thrown them together in unconventional ways to create huge dramatic tension. Rather than slavishly trying to create a naturalistic scene (and therefore ruling out plants that might have a more exotic feel to them), his planting is all-encompassing, and the result is an abstract composition that unselfconsciously mimics nature anyway. ‘I think, as humans, we just need to surround ourselves with plants. It doesn’t matter what those plants are, and the bees and insects aren’t that discerning,’ says Andrew. ‘The more abstract it is, the more like nature it is, and I think a more prescribed design would be less fitting here. I was always slightly worried that it wouldn’t fit in with the local vernacular, but I don’t think it looks out of place. It just feels natural to me, and there’s something immensely calming and elemental about it, despite this dense, motley planting.’
Ultimately, the relationship that Andrew wanted with this garden is one of deep involvement and intimate interaction, so the day-to-day gardening of it is part of the experience he craves. He arranges his work diary to accommodate the garden, taking several solid weeks at the end of the summer to cut the meadow and more time in autumn and winter to cut back perennials, prune shrubs and mulch the borders to create a dark-toned blank canvas for the snowdrops and spring bulbs to display themselves against. In spring, he pots up dahlias and sows ladybird poppies and other annuals from seed, which he will later weave into the borders. All the time he is watching his plants grow, seeing how they behave, moving them around, editing self-seeders and tying-in or cutting back perennials in a constant, mindful ritual. The seasons come and the seasons go, but the connection is always there. ‘The whole place is an extension of me – it’s bigger than me. I’m way more observant than I used to be, I’m more conscious of time, the weather and the seasons. I’m more connected to the world, whether it’s plants or nature or wildlife. It’s been an awakening. I’ll be out with friends in London and I’ll suddenly think – I want to be back home for sunset. Life feels fuller; sounds, smells, sights are sharper. It’s an intoxication. I feel more grounded, a different person, and it’s all because of this garden.’