Tips and Inspiration from England’s Great Dixter Gardens

By THOMAS C. COOPER

Great Dixter, a 112-year-old, six-acre garden located 60 miles southeast of London, has been called England’s most dynamic, exciting, and beautiful garden. Its CEO and head gardener, Fergus Garrett, is widely considered one of the finest garden-makers in the world. In 2019, Garrett received the Victoria Medal of Honour, gardening’s highest accolade, given by the Royal Horticultural Society (there can be only 63 medalists at any one time, honoring the duration of Queen Victoria’s reign).

Great Dixter was the home of Daisy and Nathaniel Lloyd, who bought the 15th-century manor house in 1910 and expanded it with the assistance of famed Edwardian architect Edwin Lutyens. Lutyens also helped lay out the bones of the garden, which comprises several “rooms” framed by yew hedges and brick walls, all linked by a network of stone paths. The plantings were established by Daisy Lloyd, a passionate gardener, and carried on by Christopher Lloyd, her youngest (of six children), who was born in the house in 1921. Christo, as he was known to his friends, brought the garden its renown with his imaginative, rule-bending approach, which he chronicled in numerous articles (he wrote a weekly column in Country Life without interruption for 46 years). His books (listed in the sidebar below) are considered essential tools for any serious gardener.

Since Lloyd’s death in 2006, his great friend and gardening ally, Fergus Garrett, who joined Dixter in 1993, has taken the garden forward, maintaining the labor-intensive traditional practices that are increasingly rare in gardening, while constantly challenging himself, the staff, and his students to think creatively and make the garden more stimulating, more colorful, and more sustainable. (The students, funded by scholarships from Dixter and elsewhere, come from around the world to stay and work at Dixter for anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years. They are there to learn to garden the Dixter way.) “In terms of pure horticultural fireworks — and seasonal surprises — there is nowhere like Great Dixter,” said Christopher Woodward, director of London’s Garden Museum.

When this story was first published, in May 2020, Dixter was closed to the public due to Covid-19, but Garrett and a skeletal crew were still hard at work tending the gardens (which re-opened to the public in June of that year). During the early days of the pandemic, when people were forced to stay at home, they looked for beauty, comfort, and food in their own backyards—and interest in gardening rose dramatically. This led me to speak with Garrett by phone about the principles and practices he employs in making a world-class garden, and how they can be adopted to anyone’s backyard.

Q:     What’s the most enjoyable part of being a gardener?

A:     I’ll start with something primitive. The physical exercise is very rewarding — having your hands in the soil and aching when you come in after having accomplished something. I also enjoy how a packet of seeds can transport you to the meadows in Transylvania or the rocky outcrops around Constantinople, because you’re dealing with a plant that has a habitat and a community associated with it. By planting certain things, you could create a jungle that feels like Costa Rica, or it could feel like the Himalayas or something quite Jurassic, simply by changing one or two plants.

I love that creative element of it as well. There’s something really wonderful about creating a picture that flows and sways and creaks in the wind, that smells. It’s like putting paint on a canvas, but you’re dealing with living things, so it’s more three-dimensional than just putting paint on a canvas. The work can be monotonous. It is hard work. You can be out in hard weather. Things can go wrong. But you’re very privileged to be amongst nature.

I love seeing plants that I know from the garden in their natural habitat; that raises the hairs on the back of my neck. I think of trips to Anatolia with Christo, and seeing giant fennels or thousands and thousands of tulips growing wild. In many respects I find gardens less interesting, but I love the ones that are clearly original, and an extension of a person’s creativity. I went to see a friend of Christo’s not long ago. He’s a retired surgeon, in his 80s. He was wearing these ragged old clothes with torn sleeves. He’d been gardening away, it was freezing cold; he took me all around his garden. He’d broken his hip a few months earlier, and he was jumping among the stepping stones, admiring the chino-doxa that were coming up. I loved his passion.

Q:      Recent studies have shown Dixter supports a great diversity of wildlife. How does that happen in an intensively managed garden?

A:      We always knew Dixter was rich with wildlife. But ecologists often dismissed us because we were gardeners, as if we’re doing something completely artificial that was against nature.

Just by accident, we managed to get some arachnologists to visit Dixter, and they found the most extraordinary spiders. They found one spider that hadn’t been recorded in the U.K. since early in the 20th century. They found lots of things that are found in only two or three sites in the whole of the United Kingdom.

That led to a biodiversity audit of the whole site. We broke the property up into house, ornamental garden, meadows — inside and outside the garden — and the woodlands. Because we’ve probably got one of the richest meadows in the country, you’d expect the meadows and our ancient woodlands, which are dripping with vegetation, to be extraordinarily rich, and they were. But the garden itself was richer.

We don’t garden for biodiversity. We don’t think, let’s put this plant here because it’s a pollinator. We think we’re going to choose this plant because we like the look of it. But our mixed borders have layer on layer of vegetation — so a food crop over a long season — and we don’t do any spraying; we only put on organic fertilizer when and where it’s necessary. We tickle our own organic compost into the soil once a year. And we’ve got a variety of habitats. We’ve got water in our old horse pond. We’ve got cracks in stone walls. We’ve got old buildings. We’ve got old trees. We’ve got nooks and crannies left, right, and center. That variety in the garden attracts all this diversity — beetles, dragonflies, lichen, hoverflies. We’ve got over half the U.K. species count of bees, 140 different ones.

You don’t need to create a “mess” in order to get wildlife. Here is a highly ornamental garden that has lots of formality and is intensively managed, yet supports an abundance of wildlife. We’re as rich as any nature reserve around us. 

Q:     Dixter is perhaps best known for its mixed-border style of gardening. What is a mixed border, and what is its appeal?

A:     A mixed-border brings together all types of plants and bulbs — trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, biennials, climbers — giving you the greatest range of colors, shapes, and textures, to produce a garden with four seasons of interest. Instead of segregating plants by type — an herbaceous border, an annual bed, a rose garden — all those elements are woven together in a fabric that imitates nature. In the wild, plants grow in communities, not in isolation surrounded by a sea of bark mulch. A mixed border has a very free, cottagey feel and offers interest from the earliest spring bulbs to the berries and bark of deep winter.

Q:     Is this style applicable to a home garden?

A:     It absolutely can be scaled down or scaled up, and you can play with how labor-intensive you want it to be. The shrub and tree layers require less labor (though gardening is not a labor-free activity), and the bedding plants — the annuals and tender perennials like cannas and dahlias — and the self-sowers tend to require more labor. You can add in quantities of annuals and self-sowing plants, or you can cut down the amount of attention you need to give a border by having a greater proportion of shrubs and other permanent plantings.

These principles will apply perfectly well in a very different climate, too, such as they have in Southern California. The spacing between plants may be greater because there’s more competition underground for the limited water supply, and the plants must suit those conditions. But in addition to native trees and shrubs and perennials, there are plants and bulbs from South Africa or Chile or the Middle East. That said, you must be careful not to plant something that might become invasive.

Q:     Someone once said that any damn fool can have a garden that’s beautiful in spring. How does one go about creating a garden that has two or more seasons of interest?

A:     Making sure that you have plants that are going to perform over a longer period is key. If you have a number of conifers or evergreens such as hollies or mahonias or andromedas, they will give you a display over an extended season; perennials with interesting foliage — maybe a combination of hosta and a fern — will look fresh and eye-catching in the spring as they come up, but will also look good in the summer. That pairing will look good at the end of the summer as well. You could have a shrub like a viburnum or a sambucus that gives you lovely spring flowers, followed by handsome leaves, followed by berries, followed by autumn color, rather than choosing a lilac, which only gives you lovely spring flowers. This happens in nature throughout the world, where one lot of vegetation takes over from another. You just kind of imitate that succession.

I remember being in Baltimore one spring and being told they couldn’t really do this layered, succession planting, because the climate was different from ours at Dixter. But we went to a nearby woodland, and we saw that underneath the tulip poplar trees, which didn’t have any leaves on, there were hepaticas and erythroniums, mayapples, bloodroot, and other wonderful plants. They could be flowering underneath your perennials or your shrubs. Throughout the United States, in grassland flora and in woodland flora, this layering happens naturally. If you survey the woodlands in a cold area and find things like trout lilies doing their thing, you don’t have to grow that wild erythronium.

What you mustn’t do is look at the Dixter range of plants and the Dixter borders and say ‘I’m going to copy that.’ Just take that concept and the principles of what we’re doing and apply it to your conditions.

Q:    What’s more important, foliage or flowers?

A:     I think all of it together is best, but if I have to lean heavily on something, I’d always lean on foliage. It just adds strength to the garden. The flowers of a perennial may last a couple of weeks, but the foliage will be there for months, so I always think about the foliage — its shape and texture and size; is it matte or glossy and reflective, sword-shaped or cascading. What will make a stimulating contrast with its neighbors. And there are umpteen shades of green and yellow and cream in foliage, plus reds and blues and variegations. Foliage is magic.

Q:     You’ve substantially expanded the number of pots in the gardens at Dixter. What’s their role?

A:     Obviously they’re a nice welcome for the public, and they give a special bit of pizzazz. On a more practical level, we’re very often given plants, or we buy plants or bulbs that we don’t know. We pot those up and evaluate them in a pot display, where a plant can easily be pulled out if we see it doesn’t clean itself, or it whimpers at the first sign of rain.

Pots can be a valuable learning tool, and I use them in teaching our students. In arranging displays of potted plants, you employ the same principles you would use in planting a garden—you don’t want a flat display. You want to create negative spaces. You want your eye to move and be drawn. You want to contrast foliage and forms. I lay down a few rules, but actually I very much allow them to do what they want. I might take a kid who is quite comfortable with arranging things and say, I want you to do a pot display, but you’re just going to use variegated hostas. Or I might say, OK, you’ve taken an hour to do this display. Next time, do it in 10 minutes. So, I use pots as part of the process of developing their artistic sense.

Q:     Christo was obviously a huge influence on you; what are the most enduring lessons that you gained from him?

A:     To be observant. Be intelligent. Have fun, be free. I’ve learned to be much more patient in the way that I garden. As a youngster, you want to do it straightaway. Christo taught me this sort of slow approach. You take a cutting. You grow that cutting. You plant it. You watch it grow. And then, after three or four years, a planting combination starts to materialize. There’s nothing wrong with that, because you’ve got time.