While no one can ‘make’ a truly wild garden, says Monty, the skilled hand can help create a space that is beautifully in tune with its environment
I hope it is hot outside as you read this. And I hope your summer garden is loving it, soaking up the sun with the same pleasure and benefit as you or I might do.
But it is a fine line. Too hot and too dry, and plants and people wilt. Too cold and too wet, and heads drop and foliage droops under the weight of sappy growth. It can seem tough to balance all the possible permutations of weather, soil and timing to get the garden looking good at the time of year when by all rights it should be effortlessly at its best. However, a few weeks ago I visited a garden that stunned me for both its beauty and the way in which it defied all these odds. It was in the Serra de Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca, where I was filming for my new series on Spanish gardens (to be broadcast early next year), to visit Torre d’Ariant, the garden made by Heidi Gildemeister. Nearly 30 years ago, before climate change became the overridingly dominant issue for gardeners, Heidi wrote one of the first – and definitive – books on gardening in a hot, dry climate, Gardening the Mediterranean Way: How to Create a Waterwise, Drought-Tolerant Garden. Much of it was common sense. Choose your plants carefully, do not try to grow anything that does not like hot, dry conditions, put those that need most water nearest the house, let spring and autumn be your prime flowering seasons, and learn to accept a summer baking that will reduce some plants to shrivelled brown remnants but, crucially, not kill them. All good stuff and radical a quarter of a century ago, but increasingly familiar nowadays.
But nothing prepared me for the beauty, scale and richness of the garden. Some of this is natural – the 10-acre, steeply sloping hillside is blessed with huge boulders and mature oaks that left to its own devices is an area of parched scrub, but with scale and romance. However, what Heidi has done – and the trust that now runs it has beautifully maintained – is to mix this carefully protected natural planting with a wide range of fascinating plants, and a lot of shaping and pruning.
This last factor, the deliberate and skilful evidence of human handiwork, is the opposite of trendy ‘rewilding’ and completely, triumphantly beautiful. The truth is that however skilfully you plant and adapt your garden to work with your soil, position and climate, it can never be truly natural. Any garden is always a construct. It uses
