A nation of gardeners is bound to be eternally on the search for something more exciting in the view from the kitchen window. Every now and again, a deep-seated yearning for something with a bit more get up and go breaks through the polite surface. Away, then, with the drizzle-flecked windowpanes looking out onto familiar favourites and in with a vision of desert-island scenery.
Something of this nature has just occurred in the heathland of Surrey, in the august setting of RHS Wisley, not hitherto noted for revolutionary sentiments. Until recently, a handsome and instructive rose garden stood on the spot where we now find ourselves peering from beneath the giant paddle-shaped leaves of banana plants across a planting scheme more usually seen on the French Riviera. The exotic garden has landed.
There are limits to this extravagance, of course. Wisley is still Wisley and the new garden is framed by the hydrangeas of Battleston Hill on one side and the famous long herbaceous borders on another. The layout is also reassuringly conventional, with radiating paths circling a central fountain whose pineapple finial is fittingly modest in scale.
However, it’s the planting that catches the eye. It seems more suited to the coast of northern Queensland than the Home Counties.
'It flares up now and again only to peter out gradually as fashion moves on. Like a firework display, we should all rush now to marvel at the spectacle while it lasts'
Like all new gardens, this is a work in progress and adjustments will be made as time goes on. All the plants have been included for their dramatic form and outline and some will flourish irrespective of the character of the coming winter. These include a young monkey-puzzle tree, always so distinctive with its regularly spaced branches curving down to the ground, the whole tree covered in that perfect spiny green armour.
Other plants, such as the dahlias and cannas, are old friends. Some will remain in the ground, perhaps covered with a pot filled with straw, to re-emerge next May. The biggest of them all, Dahlia imperialis, is here, towering above my head, and everyone will want to see how it copes in this situation.
This might be a home, too, for my own favourite, D. merckii, whose shiny mauve blooms flourish outdoors in the botanic garden at Logan on the Mull of Galloway. The free drainage here will be a considerable help.
The questions, however, hang over the glasshouse favourites, including the big shrub Eriobotrya japonica. Can the loquat really survive the winter in England? Will it have to suffer the indignity of being wrapped up for months?
In fact, this new venture, a daring experiment in the expert hands of garden manager Emma Allen, is the latest in a long line of such breakouts. The stalwarts of England spluttered when Christopher Lloyd, chuckling with glee, dug up his rosebeds at Great Dixter and replaced them with planting very much along these lines.
The tradition can be traced back intermittently at least to the late 19th century, when William Robinson’s The English Flower Garden included a passage by John Gibson describing his grove of palm trees underplanted by Swiss-cheese plants in Battersea Park, in 1873.
The Jardin des Plantes in Paris beds out each year an elaborate scheme of rubber plants, bananas, bird’s-nest ferns and cannas on a lawn in, interestingly, the Jardin Anglais. And the Chusan palm, brought to these shores in the 1840s by Robert Fortune from the coast of China, has long been known as the Torquay palm.
The revolution, then, has been rumbling on for some time. Like all such things, it flares up now and again only to peter out gradually as fashion moves on. Like a firework display, we should all rush now to marvel at the spectacle while it lasts.
Help yourself to apples at RHS Wisley
A bumper harvest of apples has led RHS Wisely to invite members and guests to bring a bag and take
Credit: Alamy
Three gardening myths debunked by the ultimate guide: experience
Three gardening myths debunked by the greatest authority of all: Experience
Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Alan Titchmarsh on bulbs: Why they're my 'firework' plants – sit back and watch them go
Alan Titchmarsh talks about his love of bulbs, which ones not to bother with, and the difference between a gardener
-
Alan Titchmarsh: 'I am so weary of seeing Lutyens-style benches and chairs absolutely everywhere'A strategically placed chair doubles as a focal point and a spot to rest — but we need to move on from Lutyens-style ones says our regular garden columnist.
-
Blurring the lines between ornament and recreation: Nine of Britain’s best Arts-and-Crafts swimming pondsBefore the vogue for bright blue, chlorine-treated swimming pools, members of Victorian and Edwardian society built naturalistic bathing ponds inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement.
-
Ballynure House: The magical estate that transformed its bramble-covered historic garden into a pollinator paradiseWhere brambles once engulfed the historic gardens at Ballynure House in Co Wicklow, Ireland — home of Clare Reid Scott — colourful flower borders now hum with pollinators. Photographs by Jonathan Hession.
-
Defanging the Gardens Trust will hurt our most precious landscapesThe Government has proposed to remove the Garden Trust's position as a statutory consultee in planning permissions for up to 1,700 historic landscapes and gardens in order to speed up building.
-
‘I was rather excited, not remotely daunted... With hindsight, I should have been': The 25-year creation of the gardens of Glenarm CastlePay a visit to the gardens at Glenarm Castle in Co Antrim — home of Randal and Aurora McDonnell — is hard to credit that nearly all of the present garden was made this century, marvels Kathryn Bradley-Hole. Photographs by Clive Nichols.
-
The pinnacle of the English style of gardening, as fine today as it was a century agoCharles Quest-Ritson has just returned to Great Dixter for the first time in years — and it's 'the high point of all my garden visiting for a long time. I cannot recommend it too highly'.
-
The curious incident of the vanishing glasshouses: Country Life's photographs are all that remains of these awe-inspiring structuresThe ‘winter garden’ and the ‘terraced grounds of exquisite beauty’ were two of Cherkley Court’s featured attractions. They were advertised for sale in Country Life in 1910 — and then they vanished.
-
Eat up your daylilies: The underappreciated east Asian flower that's a marvel in the kitchenMark Diacono was at first suspicious of cutting the stem of a gorgeous red daylily, until he realised how delicious they are.
