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This image The Kitchen Garden features 1,400 white, pink and purple tulips in raised beds.
Opposite Layers of dense silky petals on tulip ‘Blue Diamond’.
At Ulting Wick in Essex, Philippa Burrough paints with tulips in bold colour-themed blocks and dots them around for pointillist perfection
For most gardeners, November is a time to retreat indoors, browse through the seed catalogues and dream of the warmer days to come. But not so at Ulting Wick in Essex; here the arrival of the first frosts kicks o a period of frenetic activity as Philippa Burrough begins the mammoth task of planting thousands of tulip bulbs.
Philippa and her husband Bryan moved from London to rural Essex in 1996, having purchased a 17th-century farmhouse complete with a selection of rundown barns and a garden filled with azaleas and rhododendrons. Nestled in the Chelmer Valley, the area is exceptionally dry in summer – “drier than Jerusalem”, as Philippa likes to point out – but also prone to harsh winter frosts.
The Burroughs concentrated first on updating the farmhouse and the listed barns before turning their attention to the grounds, which include four acres
An early morning sun illuminates the expansive lawn area and bathes beds of choice da odils in a golden glow.
For real razzle-dazzle look no further than our Nation’s Favourite Gardens winner, St Timothee in Berkshire, where Sarah and Sal Pajwani have carefully added structure and detail to transform a neglected ‘sleeping beauty’ into a glittering glamourpuss of a garden
WORDS JAMES ALEXANDER SINCLAIR PHOTOGRAPHS CLIVE NICHOLS
Snowdrops are an undisputed classic of the winter season. They are loved, anticipated, lauded and, when February comes, they are ubiquitous.
But while a genus like Galanthus may be well-known, there are plantspeople whose focus on the fine print goes beyond understanding the written word and into the molecular structure of the ink itself. The wonderful thing about intellectual enquiry is that it knows no limits and, like the physicists who specialise in quantum mechanics or the astronomers whose career is spent looking for far-distant galaxies, there is always someone like Joe Sharman who will take an obsession with horticultural detail to the next level.
Above Upright ‘Bumble Bee’ is distinguished by the solid green mark on its chunky outer segments; it has ‘Trym’ in its parentage.
A renowned breeder of snowdrops, Joe operates from Monksilver Nursery in Cambridgeshire, which doubles as his laboratory and lair. He fell in love with gardening at an early age and his taste in plants is accordingly catholic. Over the years he has introduced new varieties of arum, Ficaria verna and a range of other plants. In fact, at the start of his career, snowdrops were incidental.
“While I was training at Hillier’s Nursery in Hampshire, I was being mentored by Douglas Dawson and Stephen Ta er. I was young but I was very keen and they took me to every garden and nursery that they could. It was a bit like horticultural finishing school!” Joe recalls. “My first ever snowdrop was given to me by Bill Baker. It was a Galanthus reginae-olgae that he had collected in Greece but, at the time, it was just one of many new plants.”
Joe’s induction into the world of snowdrop expertise was sudden and summary when he introduced G. plicatus ‘Wendy’s Gold’, which he found following a tip o from his mother. As the first ‘yellow’ of its species, it was significant and exciting, catapulting him into the headlights of the galanthophile fraternity and onto a steep and very slippery slope.
Snowdrops are promiscuous: the species and cultivars hybridise easily and spontaneous mutations are not uncommon, so the amount of variation within the genus is very high. Snowdrop-spotting is a productive hobby for galanthophiles, yielding plants such as gorgeous, virescent ‘Green Tear’, which was found in a wood in Holland, while old gardens with established snowdrop collections are also a rich source of new plants, including ‘Phil Cornish’, which was found as a seedling, one of its parents clearly being the pagoda-shaped ‘Trym’.
Joe Sharman’s strategy, however, is far more focused: he collects everything he can lay his hands on and sets up deliberate crosses with a very specific goal in mind. “I am fascinated by the rare, the unusual and the new, and I realised that the most exciting plants are the ones that have not appeared yet – so I set out to create them,” he explains. “A new combination of features on a species is a special thing. It is really dramatic!”
Above left Huge, daubed-green outer petals of ‘Ivington Green’. Above right ‘Creme Anglaise’ is distinctly cream in bud and ages to a creamy-white.
Below right Discovered as a chance seedling, ‘Phil Cornish’ takes its pagoda shape from one of its parents, ‘Trym’.
Below left Stunning ‘Green Tear’ is one of the best virescent varieties.
Top Sophie sketches her subject to get to grips with its many parts.
Middle left Paint is used to add vibrant colour to plump rosehips.
Middle right The texture and structure of crepe paper is perfect for creating realistic petals.
of season. Even in Whitby there are plastic flowers adorning shop windows – those will go to landfill when they’ve gathered enough dust.”
Bottom left Hundreds of tiny cuts produce a fringe of stamens.
Bottom right Sophie curls a rose’s calyx.
After her initial experiments, Sophie posted images of her paper flowers on social media and her supportive followers soon started placing orders: at times for a single flower, on other occasions for a whole bouquet. She now has around 20 scrapbooks filled with pressed flowers and her notes, constituting a kind of pattern book to which she can refer whenever an order comes in.
Coloured crepe paper is her medium of choice, its malleability and crinkles o ering endless possibilities for shaping into specific flower parts. “It holds a structure really well so it lends itself to making things in 3D,” she notes. Narrow floristry wire and floristry tape are two other essentials, followed by pastels and watercolours, which help her achieve the ‘is-it-real?’ quality of her creations.
Sophie works from the inside out, shaping stamens first using wire for filaments and balls of paper for anthers. “For the stamens I stretch out the paper so the grain is gone and it is virtually flat. I might fringe them with scissors, cutting into the paper over and over again. The thickness of the wire I use for these parts depends on the nature of the flower. A dahlia will be thicker than a rose, for example,” she
