Dove Cottage Nursery & Garden

gardens: yorkshire

This gravel path at Dove Cottage is framed with the extraordinary lit-up seedheads of Hordeum jubatum, pink Geranium ‘Dilys’ and tall Verbena bonariensis.

Hillside

splendour â–˛

The couple who created Dove Cottage Nursery & Garden transformed a difficult north-facing slope into a plant-filled paradise in the Pennines PHOTOGRAPHS MARIANNE MAJERUS | WORDS CAROLINE BECK

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gardens: yorkshire

ABOVE Viola ‘Nora’ and Acaena inermis ‘Purpurea’ in a weathered stone trough in the nursery.

RIGHT The relaxed naturalistic style at Dove Cottage uses plants such as Echinacea purpurea ‘Pink Glow’, Kalimeris mongolica ‘Antonia’, Salvia ‘Dear Anja’, Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Red Buttons’, Phlox paniculata ‘Cardinal’, Actaea ‘Queen of Sheba’ and a haze of Molinia caerulea subsp. caerulea ‘Poul Petersen’. BELOW RIGHT Acaena inermis ‘Purpurea’ forms an evergreen carpet of metallic purple foliage beneath Sporobolus heterolepsis.

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GARDEN NOTES

ne of the many perks 1.5-acre north-facing, of being sloping, naturalistic a garden writer are garden repeat visits to favourite horticultural haunts. With something as dynamic as a garden, change is inevitable, and necessary - who wants a garden to look the same year after year?

Sometimes, though, it’s sad. Owners have moved away, or become ill and had to give up, and the garden is altered beyond recognition.

But more often, the return visit is full of

Running a display garden alongside a busy nursery sounds like masochism, but it has worked pleasure, the place transformed in ways you would never have predicted.

Kim and Stephen Rogers have run Dove Cottage Nursery in the Pennines for 18 years.

It’s somewhere only the strong-willed gardener can resist, with a plant list that has you guiltily popping another must-have plant into your basket. Unusually, it has a contemporary garden alongside it, where mature specimens of the nursery plants are grown together in imaginative ways. I first visited about 12 years ago, and left inspired by the naturalistic combinations of grasses and perennials that swept down the hill like a super-charged meadow. This time, I was equally excited, but now for the pareddown simplicity, with fewer perennials and more grasses in large groups.

The one-and-a-half-acre site is balanced on a steep, wooded West Yorkshire hillside just a couple of miles from Halifax town centre.

the english garden February 2015

You need to know where you’re going, as the nursery doesn’t announce itself, but plenty do visit, intrigued to see what new plants Kim and Stephen have been trialling and propagating.

It was once a smallholding with pigs and cattle, owned by Stephen’s parents. He ran a butchery business in Halifax (and must hold the award for having been the only vegetarian butcher in Yorkshire), but they needed a change. ‘Stephen worked six days a week, and on the seventh he made sausages,’ Kim says.

The couple wanted something more satisfying and with a life outdoors. So Stephen went to Askham Bryan College to train in horticulture, followed by nearly four years working at The Savill Garden, part of the royal estate at Windsor Great Park. The family returned to Halifax to start their nursery, gradually changing the unpromising, north-facing pastureland into a nursery and garden.

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Their imagination was ignited in 1999 by a visit to Bury Court in Surrey, where designer Piet Oudolf had created a Dutch Wave style garden. Back then, it was a very new look to British eyes used to more traditional herbaceous borders. Believing that if they liked it, so would their customers, Kim and Stephen began selling grasses and tough perennials in strong colours with striking seedheads, when most of us were still wondering what this new movement in gardening was. Annual plant-buying expeditions to Dutch nurseries resulted in the creation of the garden, a place to experiment and show customers what beauties the plants for sale in the nursery could eventually become.

Running a display garden alongside a busy nursery sounds like masochism, but it’s worked.

There is a perfect word for this garden susurration. It means whispering, and even on still days, the plants are doing just that. The wind stirs up the grass stems, birds balance on swaying seedheads, and butterflies and other insects dart between flowers for nectar. It’s on

Kim & Stephen’s clever combinations

A fog of grass Molinia caerulea subsp. caerulea ‘Poul Petersen’ gives real atmosphere to this swathe of planting.

Stipa gigantea ‘Gold Fontaene’ offers a shower of golden flowers behind magenta Dianthus carthusianorum and blue Eryngium bourgatii ‘Picos Blue’.

Dark purple Actaea ‘Queen of Sheba’ along with Verbena hastata f. rosea and V. bonariensis give height.

Yellow Achillea ‘Moonshine’ contrasts with globes of Echinops sphaerocephalus ‘Arctic Glow’ and pink Diascia ‘Peter’.

The plum-centred white flowers of Verbascum blattaria f. albiflorum have an ethereal quality.

Pink Linaria purpurea ‘Canon Went’ point up to the fluffy grass Stipa calamagrostis behind.

gardens: yorkshire CLOCKWISE FROM BELOW LEFT Paths bring visitors close to the planting; steps are cut into the slope; the nursery is stocked with an abundance of great plants found growing in the garden; a variety of flower colours and shapes gives texture.

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a steep slope, so you can never see it all at once, but you can always hear it. Walking up through the garden gives a feeling of safe enclosure, but the big, restless Yorkshire sky above reflects the motion of the plants. Views change at every bend in the rising path. Grasses that are head-high when you are alongside them look completely different from above; the scale of things changing and tricking your eye.

It’s a simpler, and perhaps more satisfying arrangement of plants now than when I first visited. There are more grasses in bolder groups, interplanted with carefully chosen perennials to give highlights of flower and contrasting shapes, and because these are the Pennine hills, the shifting light - pewter-coloured one second, gold the next - has as much affect as the planting.

‘It’s these small moments that stop us in our tracks when we’re working,’ says Kim. For all the graft, the couple clearly love the garden.

When they first began, they thought they’d be orchestrating nature, but experience has shown them that co-operation is better than control.

Self-seeding plants such as fennel and foxglove are left to do their stuff, judiciously weeded out later or kept depending on where they are. Even

the english garden February 2015

snails, usually seen as enemies of early foliage, are given some leeway. Kim has a fondness for the small mustard-coloured ones on the fennel stems, like ‘pearl buttons’.

The garden is left uncut until early spring. It’s something we’re all now encouraged to do, but Kim and Stephen achieved this by happy accident many years ago. ‘We didn’t have time to cut back one autumn,’ explains Kim. ‘The bad weather came early, and we were tired and didn’t do it. We didn’t know just how beautiful the seedheads looked in winter with frost on them until we saw it with our own eyes.’

I left them happy that their nursery and garden have thrived despite a long recession, bitter winters in which they lost stock plants by the wheelbarrow load, and changing public taste. They’ve weathered it all, and despite claiming they have less energy now, confidence and fierce pride remain. Dove Cottage is still a place that sets gardeners dreaming.

Dove Cottage Nursery & Garden, Shibden Hall Road, Halifax, West Yorkshire HX3 9XA. Open from March to the end of September - see www.dovecottage nursery.co.uk for details. Tel: +44 (0)1422 203553.

dove cottage notebook OPPOSITES ATTRACT The thistle-like flowers of Cirsium ‘Mount Etna’ work superbly with the tall spikes of Veronicastrum virginicum ‘Erica’. The colours of the two flowers are similar but the interest comes from the contrasting shapes.

ON A WAVE The garden is bound by a yew hedge, cut in a series of waves to echo the movement of the garden. Against its dark-green hue, echinops and Eryngium bourgatii ‘Picos Blue’ look good against pale stems of grasses.

GARDEN CHALLENGES

STRIKING SILHOUETTE Seedheads like this Hordeum jubatum are extremely important in the garden.

It’s not just flowers that can give interest, but seedheads too.

SOIL: When the couple started, the garden was pasture with a thin layer of top soil above heavy clay. They enriched the soil with really generous measures of compost and top soil stripped off the developing nursery, plus added grit for drainage. It’s still only a spade’s depth, but it suits the plants that grow here.

ALSO IN THE AREA ● GARDEN Landfarm Gardens A five to six-acre garden and arboretum with sculptures and autumn colour. Colden, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire HX7 7PJ. Tel: +44 (0)1422 842260. www.landfarmgardens.co.uk ● HOUSE Shibden Hall Dating back to 1420, the most famous resident of this Grade ll* listed, timber-framed manor house was Anne Lister, of the infamous 19th-century coded diary. Lister’s Road, Halifax, West Yorkshire HX3 6XG. Tel: +44 (0)1422 352246. ● PLACE TO VISIT Dean Clough Once the world’s largest carpet factory, this is now an arts, culture and business venue showcasing the best the region has to offer. Halifax, West Yorkshire HX3 5AX. Tel: +44 (0)1422 250250. www.deanclough.com

STEPHEN & KIM’S TOP PLANTING TIPS ● Start a compost heap straight away. We had compost made up from animal waste from when this was a smallholding, and all the waste green material from the nursery. It was superb. ● Plant plenty of late-flowering grasses. They act as green buffers in spring and early summer between flowering perennials, and hold it all together in late summer and autumn when there’s less in flower. ● Some of the plants we grow like good drainage, so when planting we add masses of grit or gravel to the soil. Any surplus can be used as mulch, which also makes a good substrate for interesting self-seeding plants. ● We have lots of benches throughout the garden. These aren’t just for our visitors. We often like to sit down, look at what we’ve planted, and consider whether or not a combination works. ● Don’t over-feed or over-water plants. They’ll develop more slowly, but be sturdier in the long run. We also avoid plants that need either masses of chemicals to keep them going, or a blanket of blue slug pellets to stop them being eaten.

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