GARDENING
Passionate gardener Andrew Salter has surrounded his house with a kaleidoscopic tapestry of plants “like a web made by spiders on LSD”
Delivery drivers are baffled. They can see Andrew Salter’s front door – they might even spot him waving from the deck surrounding the house – and they can see a gap in the fence enclosing the garden, but how do they get from one to the other?
And that’s just how he intended it to be. “I abhor bare earth,” he says boldly. “And I wanted the planting to be overwhelming.” (There is, of course, a path, but it’s not immediately obvious below the riot of roses, acanthus, foxgloves and hardy geraniums.)
This dense and exuberant planting style, where there is barely space to squeeze between purple alliums rubbing shoulders with lime-green euphorbias – where you need to edge round a giant fennel or gently hold aside a branch of a black elder – will be familiar to anyone who’s visited the gardens at Great Dixter in East Sussex, where Andrew has spent many years mostly volunteering, slotted in around a career as a special-effects artist.
In autumn 2014 when he bought his house at the foot of the North Downs in Kent, it was just a barn in a grassy field: “It was very unusual, like a long narrow ship raised on a course of bricks.” And it was spartan, to say the least, with just one storage heater and a warm dribble of a shower and already a hint of winter in the air. “I was basically living in a shed,” Andrew says. “But my priority was the garden. I started making it before I even had a kitchen. I took out my spade and started digging. I did nearly all of it manually until my neighbours lent me arotavator.”
Gardening is a passion that hit him unexpectedly in his early thirties. His Damascene conversion took place on a street in Whitstable: “As a kid I wouldn’t have known what a daffodil looked like. Then one day I went out and walked along the road and looked at all the gardens and felt a kinship with them. All I wanted from that day forth was to work with plants.” So he enrolled on a course at Hadlow College in Kent: “It was basically a course for kids who hadn’t got on well at school and whose parents were having a last-gasp attempt to give them an education. It was a bunch of 16-year-olds – and me. That was a novel experience.” Although Andrew learned the basics there, he credits Great Dixter as where his real education began, sometimes spending four days a week under the tutelage of head gardener
