Grower Charlie Ryrie details her personal journey from intensive flower farming to lower-maintenance gardening, adapting to life’s challenges
There are many stories in this garden. I arrived on a whim because the place refused to sell after my mother died. There were plans to sell it at auction, but I didn’t want that to happen as my mother loved it so much here. So I bought it myself. I dug many new beds, removed most of the non-cutting plants (and conifers) that were growing in the garden and moved my cut-flower business from Herefordshire on several lorries.
Back when I started growing, in Herefordshire, more than 20 years ago, I gave myself an acre to fill with mixed perennials; I planted foliage and added bulbs and annuals. I planned to concentrate on mail order, but soon events and weddings took over. Within five years, I had expanded into another three acres.
I remember my joy at the first massed tulips and blocks of dancing white corncockles, my slight smugness at producing spectacular delphiniums. The Herefordshire light clay soil was accommodating, perhaps as excited as I was to be hosting such variety after years as starved pony paddocks.
It was wonderful to have an excuse to experiment with growing whatever I wanted, but I soon found it hard to retain excitement for rows of neat seedlings and well-weeded beds. I enjoyed using foraged and wild materials alongside beauties from the cutting field, so I planted more foxgloves, lysimachias, crocosmias and persicarias. I dispensed with dahlias and cut down on annuals. I wanted wilder flowers, more diversity.
After a decade, I moved here to warmer, damper Dorset, which forced more changes to my palette. The soil is heavy, poorly draining greedy clay, which I fed and mulched with muck and composts in early winter, but otherwise left. Many perennials that came with me sulked or worse, so I invested in several hundred roses that liked heavier soil. Some overbred forms didn’t much care for it, and the garden didn’t much care for them either.
When the pandemic struck, and event work stopped, I kept some mail-order going, but otherwise stopped cutting blooms and allowed myself to observe the gardens. I noticed that many weeds found a useful role as living mulches; how grasses around shrubs funnelled moist
