The hills are alive
Exotic planting in Wiltshire
With not many passing places, and the odd horse and rider squeezing past your wing mirrors, it can be an adventure navigating the narrow, mile-long lane to Derry Watkins’s garden and nursery. A few hundred feet up the escarpment between Bath and the M4, and exposed to the south-west wind, this is not a cosy spot. ‘The fact that we are halfway between Cold Ashton and Freezing Hill gives a clue to the climate,’ she says. ‘ And we have a sticky, heavy, alkaline clay.’
When you get here, you can see the compensations – fabulous views, hours of sunlight, and tranquil isolation – but the secret behind the transformation of these fve and a half acres into a topnotch plantsman’s garden has been grit: both the gravelly kind and the American kind.
Watkins, 67, is from Connecticut. ‘I am here because I married an Englishman. Peter [Clegg] was at Yale doing a master’s in environmental design when we met, and I was into biodynamic vegetable growing – actually I studied psychology and had originally intended to be a flmmaker, but once I got my own patch of dirt I loved it so much that my path was set. We came over to the UK while Peter was doing a further degree at Cambridge, but when it came time to go home he was ofered a partnership in an architectural practice in Bath. We argued for a while, but eventually I agreed to it.’ For the frst 17 years, while bringing up their two children and starting the nursery, they lived four miles away, but in 1995 came the opportunity to create their present home from a derelict barn.
‘Actually we built the greenhouse before the house. I can’t stand outdoor gardening in winter. It was having a big greenhouse in our last house that made me switch from vegetables to fowers. Tender plants are so beautiful,’ Watkins says. One of the surprises of her garden is seeing how many of them, after being nurtured under glass from seed or cuttings, are decanted into the garden as permanent residents. The beds near the house sport purple Geranium
incanum from South Africa, lemon-fowered coronilla from the Mediterranean, and pink, yucca-like
Beschorneria septentrionalis from Mexico. They thrive because they are growing in perfect drainage in the form of a thick layer of gravel. ‘I don’t combine it with the soil. Generally I am antidigging,’ she says. ‘I just pile the gravel on top of the clay – and do the same with compost in other areas.’ In the upper bed the gravel is 8in deep, which sounds excessive. ‘Tender things love it. Gravel is an amazing medium. Capillary action makes sure it stays moist, and hardly any weeds can seed into it.’
Happily, one of the few plants capable of sowing itself into such deep gravel is Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’, whose pendant fowerheads are a delectable medley of turquoise, plum and sea-green