Longmeadow is always evolving and a key area has undergone a major transformation. Monty explains the reasons behind it and why he loves this new, simple space
After a long and particularly wet winter
we have arrived at the most exciting time of year, when the world is unfolding daily in clouds of floral glory in the season of tulips, forget-me-nots, alliums, irises and above all blossom – blossom spilling off trees, shrubs and hedges, blossom in clouds of glorious flower, blossom filling the warm spring evenings with delicious fragrance.
But I have always been obsessed by what the Japanese call ma. I think that the best translation (and for any Japanese speakers reading this, please do tell me if I am wrong) is that it refers to the significance of the space between things. This might be the space between two words, two notes of music, two beats of the heart, but in horticultural terms it effectively means the space between plants or parts of plants.
The Japanese devote much time and skill to creating ma within plants – think of bonsai, pruned maples and pines – but I find that the deepest satisfaction I derive from the spaces between things is less subtle and more monumental than that. So I love hedges and the entrances created by gaps in hedges. I love the enclosed spaces that hedges contain and I love the empty aisles between the columns of tree trunks. I think that the width of paths, the exact height of hedges, the role of hedge buttresses and returns is all critical in the making of a garden and as important, beautiful and essential to any garden as its selection of flowers.
I also know that this is not necessarily shared by all gardeners. The most fashionable gardening nowadays is the prairie planting that emerged from Germany and Holland in the 1990s, of which Piet Ouldof is the most esteemed and famous practitioner. Last summer I visited the garden that Piet created at Scampston Hall in North Yorkshire, which perfectly marries his sublime architectural use of hedges and prairie planting. But other gardens, both by him and his many followers that are ‘just’ large expanses of planting do not light my fire in the same way. I like them, admire the great skill often involved in creating sweeping drifts flowing through a matrix of grasses that can sustain from season to season, but I never love them in the way I can love an avenue of trees or a fine hedge.
There is a reason for this soul baring. A few months ago we bulldozed a part of Longmeadow that we call The Long Wa
