Bringing Mediterranean planting to Britain

Mark Griffiths explains why we value Mediterranean planting patterns so tremendously, why he urges all to purchase Mr. Filippi’s ‘Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden: A Way to Seize the Natural Beauty of the Garrigue’, and why he could by no means undertake the strategies defined within himself.

Over thirty years ago, Olivier and Clara Filippi constructed Pépinièrilippi (www.Jardin-sec.Com), a nursery at Mèze in the Midi, France, specializing in Mediterranean flora. They have also pioneered a new method of lawn-making for the region. It uses local species in schemes that mirror their wild habitats, installs no artificial irrigation, and gives free rein to the dynamics that function in natural ecosystems.

‘Much as I respect his technique, I ought to never undertake it.’

Last month, I noticed the guide of M. Filippi’s fantastically illustrated extent in this revolution: Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden: how to seize the herbal splendor of the garrigue (Filbert Press, £40). It may appear to be naming one’s gardening ebook of the year early, but there’s no resistance to the maquis on those pages.

Much as I admire M. Filippi’s technique, I should never adopt it.

I want to domesticate a much wider range of species, as carefully as everyone calls for. One wouldn’t deprive domestic animals of the water, so why stint lawn plants? But I am delighted this ebook for its discipline notes, plant inventory, and layout ideas.

In any case, Mediterranean gardening in Britain isn’t the same as inside the Mediterranean, as M. Filippi allows. Our climate remains different, as is our mindset to the flora concerned. They’re exotics to be tended and valuable; they’re not all from the Med.

Our fondness for developing them, ultimately took root throughout the Roman profession. However, the first documented flowering didn’t appear until the sixteenth century. The Elizabethan gardening cognoscenti cultivated Tamarix, Phillyrea, olives, holm alright, cypresses, lavender, rosemary, Cistus, Santolina, and Artemisia. Come iciness, many survived unprotected, albeit within the embody of walled gardens.

Then, our climate went north because the Little Ice Age was a bit difficult. By the 1670s, John Evelyn began lamenting the bloodless devastation of Mediterranean prizes. Gardeners overlooked them till the nineteenth century, while botanical travelers reacquainted us with this frost-banished vegetation. Charmed, we resolved to risk these flowers’ exterior again, most effective this time; we learned to propagate them and to preserve some of every in reserve below glass over wintry weather.

Before long, we had been discovering that Mediterranean-like areas existed around the world and that their vegetation deployed comparable techniques against sun and drought: mainly, their foliage, which ranged in texture from fleecy to succulent, wax-bloomed, bone-hard, and filigree-great, and in color from silver to hoary-white, blue-gray, and bronze.

These numerous complexions account for some of our gardens’ maximum putting and delightful accessions: Corokia cotoneaster and Olearia microdontia from New Zealand; Acacia bailey-ana Purpurea and Leucophyta brownie from Australia; Melianthus main and Kniphofia caulescens from South Africa; Fascicularia bicolor and Colletta paradox from South America; Romneya coulteri and Yucca rostrata from the American South-West; Elaeagnus Quicksilver and Pyrus salicifolia Pendula from the Caucasus; and Crambe maritima and Eryngium maritimum, our very own pricey local sea kale and sea holly.

I used all of the above within the first of many gravel gardens I’ve made – along the south face of my circle of relatives home in Buckinghamshire. It turned into ‘full of the warm South,’ upholstered with silver-gray shrubs and perennials from the garrigue, maquis, matorral, and phrygana.

Their hardiness concerned me more than that of their Southern Hemisphere partners. I’d over-winter spares of my favorite Cistuses, Teucrium fruticans, and Phlomis italics in a chilly frame and be troubled approximately frost on Helleborus lividus Paeonia cambessedesii. These two Balearic beauties bloomed too early for safety. Often, the fear turned warranted: this was in the early Nineteen Eighties, while our winters had been long and difficult.

Soon afterward, our climate started developing, and it became especially milder. Mediterranean planting prospered. As a policy, it saved water and labor, as Essex masterpieces, Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden and Hyde Hall’s Dry Garden, illustrated.

It offered ever-greater pleasures as a style and plant palette. We ought to now cultivate olives, Italian cypresses, and the fan palm Chamaerops humilis, all previously deemed gentle. The influx of suitable candidates from past the Mediterranean also multiplied, and it continues.

Recently, for instance, it delivered us Senecio candidates Angel Wings, a prodigious perennial with large and pricey, silver-pelted leaves that turned out to be much more difficult than humans imagined—however, what else would one expect from a Falkland Islands local?

So I stand via our model of the Mediterranean garden – eclectic, outlandish, sophisticated, and nurtured – while urging, ‘Do buy M. Filippi’s book.’