A room with a view

I think I’ve died and gone to heaven. Well, a heaven populated with good-looking Italians, blue skies from sunrise to dusk, street stalls offering lemon granita and the best tasting cherry tomatoes, and restaurants that serve buffalo mozzarella for lunch and fresh zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta for dinner. Every day I wake up, stroll out onto the sunny terrace lined with pots of golden lantana, and pinch myself. But it’s all true: Positano in Italy rocks!
I’m staying in a hotel described on the internet as having its own “botanical garden”. Usually I’d consider that webspeak for “a cheap dive with a small patio filled with geraniums in terracotta pots and an obligatory citrus or two”. But Palazzo Murat in Positano, on the Amalfi Coast near Naples, is sheer bliss. This 18th century palace was once the summer residence for Napoleon Bonaparte's brother-in-law (then the King of Naples... and its garden is gorgeous. So gorgeous that I’m wondering if they need a Kiwi apprentice to help out next summer…
The hotel’s breakfast buffet is shaded by a huge Chorisia speciosa, one of my favourite trees of all time, its trunk armour-plated with fat spines. In summer it produces pink flowers like Oriental lilies. It’s such a star, but quite hard to find in New Zealand. (I think Russell Fransham stocks it, and Wairere Nurseries in West Auckland used to offer it). From the breakfast patio, the main restaurant area is lined with cacti and succulents, bouganvillea drips off the terraces, there are tropical treasures – hibiscus, bananas, brugmansias – and best of all, there are fruit trees: figs, guavas, lemons, oranges, and even a feijoa.
The hotel even has its own thriving vege plot with rows of gourmet lettuces, cherry tomatoes, Roma tomatoes and big, fat, healthy looking basil plants. They’re the size of small shrubs. Bellissimo!

Garden fashions in France

I've just got back to Paris after spending the day at the International Festival of Gardens at Chaumont-sur-loire, about two hours out of the city by train. This contemporary garden design festival is staged all summer long in the immaculate grounds of Chaumont Chateau, overlooking the Loire Valley. Last year when I was there, the festival was evacuated after a dramatic electrical storm hit - I've never seen such spectacular lighting - but this year the weather gods smiled and turned on a 30+ scorcher. Nothing like a sunburnt nose and shoulders to mark you out as a tourist in the European summer!
For this year's festival, the theme was "community" and all of the gardens had an underlying concept of sharing - be it knowledge, produce from the garden, or simply providing a place for friends and family to meet. At least, that's the theory. But sometimes it gets lost in the execution, because Chaumont excels at the conceptual end of landscape design (ie, most gardeners don't get it, even when it's translated into English!)
You won't see picture-perfect Chelsea-style show gardens at Chaumont, but there are always a few natty ideas worth nicking. I think, however, that I'll keep my pickles in the pantry, rather than preserving them in my garden walls! This garden (pictured) was designed as a "homage to the preserves of our grandparents". The earth walls enclosing its courtyard spaces were inset with more than 200 jars of preserved vegetables, each made to an old family recipe. Only problem is, they're fermenting badly in the sun... I suppose it's also playing homage to the art of preserving, and the skill it takes to ensure your chutneys and pickles don't end up bottling botulism as well. Funnily enough, when I sat down to lunch in the festival's restaurant, they had a beautiful jar of pickles on display with their cheese platters. But when the waitress opened it, it fizzed like a can of coke. Oops. Said jar of pickles quickly developed a sense of community with the rubbish bin.
Still on the subject of rubbish, garden shows create a lot of leftover waste: compost, unneeded plants, bits of concrete, cut paving slabs etc. So one of the designers exhibiting at Chaumont this year picked up every piece of rubbish created by all the other designers and used this as the material for his display. I'd love to say that it looked amazingly artistic, but actually it just looked like a pile of rubbish. Or perhaps the craft table at your local kindergarten.
In another garden, the designer used wire gabion baskets (normally filled with stones and used to prevent banks eroding along motorways) to prop up a long outdoor kitchen bench. Instead of the stones, however, they were filled with recycled aluminium cans. And all the plants were labelled with metal lids from jam jars (pictured) that had been painted pale green on the inside and were threaded over curly wire stakes. Very cute. Mind you, I'd need to eat a lot of jam to label all the plants in my vege patch!
Firewood stacks are peculiarly fashionable (who would have thought?) it seems too. Not only were they used as "bug hotels" at the Hampton Court Show, at Chaumont they were stacked neatly into courtyard walls. I wonder why wood looks so cool in big heaps - perhaps it appeals on a subconscious level to our inner cave dweller... I don't know but I don't even have a wood-burning fire at home and I'm yearning for a woodpile now.
Or perhaps I'll finally get around to pruning my tangled mess of a plum tree this year, simply to harvest enough branches to make my own versions of these eco-friendly wooden roller blinds (pictured). This garden was pretty funky - not only were the branches hung as blinds, they were also used as hammocks, shade sails and, when the ends were rolled up and packed out with hessian and potting mix, planter boxes for flowering annuals. Better than trellis for privacy in a courtyard too. Mental note to self: get out the pruning saw before winter's over.

Recycling rules in Sweden

One of the most significant (and unexpected) spinoffs from my decision to grow all my own food has been the major impact it has had on my rubbish output. I rarely fill my weekly wheelie bin anymore (unless I'm spring-cleaning my wardrobe or biffing out magazines) and the new super-huge recycling bins we recently got in Auckland will take care of almost everything from now on. Plus I've finally toughened up on the compost front: all my kitchen scraps now go back in the garden (in the past I've been a bit lax and lazy).
Of course, one gardener's junk is another's joy - and it's amazing how many landscape designers are now rifling through rubbish bins in search of creative inspiration. At the Gardens of Gothenburg festival, a collection of empty food cans, a pile of glass bottles and some recycled construction bags made for three funky designs.
'Those were the days' was the name of painter and sculptor Eva Björkström's display (pictured top left), which was designed like a traditional parterre garden but with the plants growing around a colourful mosaic made from rubbish (recycled food and drink cans sorted into primary colours). It was very Andy Warholesque!
San Francisco designer Topher Delaney was responsible for two of the avant garde gardens at Gunnebo House. Her glasshouse (made from recycled glass bottles from the estate's restaurant, pictured) is particularly clever. I'm guessing it's going to take the entire summer to get enough bottles to cover the huge wire and scaffolding frame she has had constructed. I like the idea that the hotter the summer, the faster the glasshouse will be built.
Topher also designed a kitchen garden planted in recycled orange Big Bag rubbish sacks (they're a bit like our wool sacks) that had been sewn together, filled with potting mix and planted with edible crops. Something to consider if you're stuck for space but desperate to grow spuds or corn this year, or if you're renting and you think you might need to move house before your tomatoes ripen next summer...

Swede as!

I’m loving Gothenburg in Sweden. But then what’s not to like about a city that celebrates gardens to the extent that every second banner on the streets right now is showcasing a cabbage or a carnivorous plant? The Gardens of Gothenburg festival, which runs until September 28 this year, is clearly embraced by the local council. And so it should be. What fun I’ve had! There are vegetables everywhere, from the botanical gardens to the marvellous inner-city Garden Society park known as Trädgårdsföreningen (try saying that after a couple of glasses of Swedish schnapps!)
Gardens of Gothenburg is a fantastic festival because it’s spread over four quite different venues, it runs all summer long, it’s not overly commercial, and the installations – from international designers from London to New York – range from classically beautiful to quirky and whimsical.
I went to Trädgårdsföreningen first. This garden is as old as New Zealand: it was officially formed in 1842, but recently they’ve been renewing the planting. There’s a modern rose park with newly planted beds designed by Piet Oudolf, for example, and even the most contemporary installations don’t look out of place. I loved the espaliered pears and apple trees, at least 5m high, trained up one of the historic buildings (pictured above, behind the palms and agaves).
The highlight though, was Gunnebo House and Gardens, an 18th century park that’s considered to be one of the foremost neo-classical country estates in Northern Europe. The house boasts three styles of gardens, kitchen garden, formal garden and landscaped parkland. As you can probably guess, I made a beeline for the vege patch!
Three designers were commissioned to create “kitchen gardens of the future” in a spot right next to the organic potager that supplies Gunnebo’s restaurant. There was a strong sustainability theme behind all the gardens; one was entirely planted in recycled bags from the construction industry (very cool); another is using all the restaurant’s glass bottles to slowly build a glasshouse over the summer. There was even a mobile kitchen garden designed around a campervan, with its tent awning transformed into a greenhouse and edible plants sprawling around its wheels.
At Gunnebo, they’ve also recreated an authentic 18th century kitchen garden planted with heritage varieties, but my absolute favourite design was the antithesis of this tidy arrangement. It was a futuristic kitchen garden designed as an edible meadow in “a revolt against Gunnebo’s strict lines and symmetry” and I must admit it’s inspired me to step up my self-sufficiency campaign even more. I’m just going to plant veges EVERYWHERE and let them fight it out for supremacy. I love the concept of an edible meadow, with crops coming and going in a happy jumble.
Best of all, the purple/bronze colour scheme will translate perfectly into my front garden, so I’m going to pinch the idea – lock, stock and barrel!
The plants they’d used included: huge purple cabbages, maroon-foliaged ‘Bull’s blood’ beetroot, lime kohlrabi as big as baseballs, purple sage (Salvia officinalis ‘Purpurea’), bronze fennel, leeks, red lettuce, dwarf beans, red amaranthus, rhubarb, curry plant (although you’d have to chop off the yellow flowers later in summer or they’d ruin the colour scheme). And the piece de resistance? Variegated sage (Salvia officinalis ‘Tricolor’). I’ve always thought this was the ugliest plant on the planet (although it’s a close battle with the salmon-pink Chinese toon tree), but in this edible meadow it was a touch of absolute genius.
PS. I must look like a local. Everyone keeps chatting to me in Swedish.

Sustainability can be sexy!

Ignore everything I've said so far about self-sufficiency and eco-chic, green gardening, because over the next three weeks I'l be chugging through enough carbon to consume a small forest! I've escaped the polar weather in Auckland this week by sneaking off to Europe to go to all the summer gardening shows over here. Or at least, that was the plan, but the weather in London today was no cause to break out the bikinis. Blustery and showery sums it up, although apparently we missed a shocker of a day yesterday, with torrential rain causing all sorts of trouble. Certainly the grounds of the Hampton Court Flower Show looked more like that of the Glastonbury Festival - or a graveyard for mud-stained sparkly sandals. I sensibly wore jandals. Came back to the hotel with mud-caked toes. Eww.
There were three stand-out gardens for me at the Hampton Court show this year, and each for different reasons. Today I'll start with the Sustainability Can Be Sexy garden designed by (and surely this is the best-ever name for a landscape design company): Floral and Hardy. The judges only gave it a bronze (they apparently told the designers their planting was too sparse and the "sexy" name wasn't appropriate for a family garden. Which is funny, because you can actually produce a family without, well...)
Anyway, to the nuts and bolts of the garden. It was packed with fun features, from the blue hammock and outdoor cushions woven from recycled seat belt straps from cars that had failed their warrant of fitness tests, to a shade sail knitted from recycled shopping bags. There were birdhouses made from recycled real estate For Sale signs (what else can you do with them after you've sold your house?) and a big bug hotel made from a stack of firewood. The walls were made from Hempcrete (a mix of hemp fibres and powdered lime) and the compost bins were made from recycled timber pallets stained with (presumably organic) English tea! Also quaint was the grass-clad hobbit house, with its round door made from a recycled wine barrrel with the top and bottom cut off. The hobbit house was clad with turf recycled from the show garden site itself. And there were bat boxes on the back wall. I like the idea of a bat box more than I like the idea of bats living in it, but all in all, a really cute garden.