What makes La Corolla an English Garden?
28 June 2023
By: James Lennox
At heart, I’m a plant collector. Not in the George Forrest or Ernest Wilson mould. Not for me leeches in my breeches or yak’s milk tea for breakfast. I’m more of a plantaholic – I see a shiny new bauble, in a nursery, a friend’s garden or an arboretum, and I have to have it.
It’s a dangerous obsession. Not only can it be detrimental to the bank balance, it can leave the garden looking like a random collection of disparate plants plonked any old how with no attention paid to their aesthetic potential.
So, when I came to Asturias and set about creating a garden at La Corolla, my thoughts turned to choosing a garden style that would best accommodate the widest range of plants I could lay my hands on without sacrificing form to function.
I immediately settled on two possibilities, both English in feel. It was almost inevitable that I’d be drawn to styles I knew best, having grown up in England surrounded by fine examples of both. The garden and the gardener might both be in Spain, but visual memories formed long ago have a habit of defining future creations.
At first, I was attracted by the thought of creating a garden on the grandest scale. Once upon a time, English gardening was synonymous with the landscapes of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, wherein three basic components (water, trees and grass) were used to create a harmonious vision of the English countryside perfected. From now on, English gardens followed a different course from what was happening in the rest of Europe.
Stowe Gardens, England
For a very brief moment, I toyed with the idea of relocating the village and flooding the valley below La Corolla, but financial and legal constraints soon put an end to that particular dream. And a Brownian landscape really isn’t the best setting for a collection of plants.
Blenheim Palace, England
Instead, I took inspiration from a later style of garden popularised by William Robinson, Gertrude Jekyll and their followers. The easiest way to characterise this style, often associated with the Arts & Crafts movement, is as a combination of formal structure (dissolving with distance from the house) and informal planting (becoming wilder to meet up with the natural landscape). Paths, steps, garden features, all the hard landscaping elements of a garden are offset by billowing, blowsy planting, full of softness, carefully graded colour schemes, densely packed borders and a preference for natural forms.
This is still, over a century after its advent, the preferred style template for country gardens in England. The plant combinations may vary, but the feel and general look remain. For as long as there is an England, there will be English gardeners determined to perfect the art of the herbaceous border, tinkering with the placement of perennials, constantly changing the line-up of star plants.
Oxford Botanic Garden, England
And therein lies, I feel, a clue as to the real essence of post-eighteenth century English gardens – they’re all about movement. English gardens are never finished, they always require attention and revision, they can be labour intensive but they are always full of incident. That brief moment of stasis I wrote about earlier never lasts long.
Russell Page best describes this quality in The Education of a Gardener:
“English gardens seem to be always in flux. The fugitive pleasures which gardening affords seem to be enhanced for us by a subtle and deliberate disorder that softens the emphasis of a straight line and never allows the garden to appear static or achieved.”
The climate has a great deal to do with the constant evolution of English gardens. A week of settled weather is a rare phenomenon. Rain and wind are natural harbingers of change, hastening the growth of plants one minute, presaging their slow decay the next. And in that, Asturias differs little from England.
As for disorder, you could say that’s one of our specialities at La Corolla. The main characteristic of European gardens all the way back to Le Nôtre and beyond is the primacy of order over the natural. That preference can still be seen in public gardens in Spain and elsewhere to this day – neatly pruned shrubs, straight paths, trimmed edges. Elegant, refined, formal.
In England, the preference for the natural won out in the eighteenth century with Brown and his imitators, and English gardeners have never really looked back. Trees remain unclipped unless they are pressed into service as hedges to divide garden rooms. A return to formal parterres and straight lines is almost unthinkable, scarce recent examples of such formality being the 1980s craze for ornamental potagers kickstarted by Rosemary Verey, or historic garden restorations as at Hampton Court Palace.
At La Corolla, where there are straight paths they are constantly being invaded by plants, either overhanging or self-seeding into the paths themselves. This looseness lends the garden, I think, a relaxed feel. If a plant is happiest growing in the path (and I can still walk past without too much difficulty), then so be it. Not only is the disordered, slightly dishevelled look my aesthetic preference, it seems to chime with the current concern about encouraging wildlife into the garden. Any trend that permits the odd weed will always get a friendly hearing from me. And it avoids the risk that an overly neat, manicured garden can veer away from elegance towards sterility.
And it is this garden style that, I think, lends itself best to showcasing the widest possible selection of plant material, another key ingredient in English gardens. This obsession with variety seems to be in inverse proportion to the small number of garden-worthy native species. It’s almost as if, deprived of plant variety at home, the Englishman was determined to acquire plants from everywhere else in the world to pop in his garden.
I happily plead guilty to continuing this tradition. In fact, it’s probably been strengthened by moving to Asturias where the garden is blessed with ample rainfall and scarcely any frost. The range of plants I’m tempted to grow has widened beyond anything I would attempt in England. Experimentation is fun, pushing the limits of the possible is exciting and helps to keep the garden feeling young and fresh. And variety moves the garden along – just as the roses are going over, the herbaceous perennials are reaching their peak, with the ornamental grasses waiting to take over. There’s always something coming on stream to distract the eye.
And it doesn’t really matter where the plants originate – as long as the garden and gardening style are consistent, some of my odder plant combinations (laburnums and grevilleas, anyone?) seem to work out just fine. So, a garden inspired by the style of Robinson and Jekyll, packed with hardy and half-hardy plants from around the world, combined with a relaxed approach to pruning, maintenance and general tidiness in the middle of Asturias – what could be more English?
All photos taken at La Corolla unless otherwise indicated
