For a few hours on Sunday a living room-full of us were spirited away across an (insignificant) ocean to a place where gardeners grow. I’m still suffering (though suffering is definitely the wrong word for how I feel) from something kind of like jet lag. I feel like I was picked up and put back down on earth in a completely different place. I’m still getting my bearings. Nothing Fergus Garrett, head gardener and CEO of Great Dixter, talked about was particularly revolutionary and yet I’m all spun around.

As Fergus Garrett, head gardener and CEO of Great Dixter in East Sussex, England, spoke to us about the history of Great Dixter house and gardens, it was easy to draw some parallels to Blithewold. Both families put particular marks of their very own on their much loved houses and landscapes, and they passed on their passion for the garden to at least one of their children. Christopher Lloyd, an extraordinary plantsman and prolific garden writer learned the Fine Art of flower gardening from his mother, Daisy. “Christo” spent his entire life gardening at Great Dixter. He changed very little of his parents’ design but was never fettered to the past. Through constant experimentation he pursued and taught a method of gardening that is not for the faint of heart: there are no rules. — well, there’s one rule. Plant the right plant. And to that I’d probably add a doctrine: pay attention, stay engaged, take notes, and enjoy! There’s nothing static about a garden – in any season. It’s always changing and the passionate gardener revels in and directs the changes like a symphony conductor.

Walking around the Blithewold grounds with Fergus was itself a lesson for me. As proud as I generally am of our gardens, they seemed suddenly ordinary and contrived. Plants look planted. At Great Dixter there is a balance between the wild and natural – the tall-grass meadows full of East Sussex wildflowers, grasses and orchids – and the cultivated – crisply clipped topiaries and hedges. The same dichotomy grows with wild, meticulously tended abandon in their gardens. Fergus made a bee-line to our shoreline and studied plants there that I have taken so for granted that I don’t even know their names. His mind is wide open and interested in every plant and its potential use in their gardens.

The good news is that passion can be taught by any good mentor and learned by us. The spirit of Christopher Lloyd – and his parents – lives on not only through the tradition of a constantly changing palette of plants at Great Dixter but in the imagination of all the avid gardeners and interns who pass through the Lutyens gate. Fergus’ enthusiasm for gardening is as infectious as his mile-wide smile. Gail and I – and probably most of people who were in the living room on Sunday are ready to cross the pond to visit Great Dixter. We’d like to spend at least a week learning from the mentors there and definitely take Fergus up on his offer of cake. For more information on visiting Great Dixter, click here.

Waves of excitement have washed over me all spring long – it’s really been such an extraordinary season with so much coming into bloom early and then lingering. Since it’s all been about two weeks ahead, we’re on track now for the first week of June blooms – and right on time (?) the Chestnut rose is beginning to open!

Even when the season isn’t pushing us forward, we gardeners often cast ahead – especially when we’re in planting-mode, like now. Every year Gail and I try new designs, new plants, new combinations. We’re getting to exercise our creative muscles every day (a river of sedum!) and follow through on ideas that have been percolating and incubating since last summer (a Display Garden bed of bold textures and deep colors!). And I’m getting so psyched to see it all come together.

Simply being creative in the garden can sometimes be all the inspiration we need to be even more creative – like any muscle, it gets stronger the more we use it. But there’s nothing like talking to another gardener to really get the ideas and enthusiasm flowing. A few years ago Gail and I jumped at the chance to hear a talk by Fergus Garrett. Fergus, of course, is head gardener at Great Dixter, which is the home of the late Christopher Lloyd and one of the most inspiring gardens in the world, whether you’ve been there or not (I have not). Fergus spoke on how to plan and plant for a succession of blooms and made it look so easy. We have been jazzed to follow his advice in our gardens ever since – especially the North Garden where we just took out the tulips to make way for swaths of annuals and tender perennials whose blooms will carry us through the summer into fall.

And that’s why, when Gail and I heard that Fergus Garrett is coming here – to Blithewold! on Sunday, June 27 (12-2pm), we just about went over the moon. His talk will be about the gardens of Great Dixter and his work with the Great “Christo”. So if you’re looking for a little push to get psyched about your own garden – or even if you’re already excited about it – you should absolutely not miss this event. Click here to register.

Are you flexing your creative muscles in the garden? Do you try different things every year? Will you be joining us on June 27th? – Let me know and I’ll save you a seat!

Open any one of William Cullina’s books and you’ll get a good idea of the sort of person he is (our kind) and if you’re me, you’ll read cover to cover and learn something new on each page. Invite him to speak, and you’ll have the pleasure of meeting one of the most articulate, knowledgeable, and down-to-earth horticulturists on Earth. For Blithewold’s annual Garden Design Luncheon fundraiser yesterday, Bill tailored a talk drawn from both his latest book, Understanding Perennials: A New Look at an Old Favorite, as well as his latest design work as Plants and Garden Curator at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens (where a single garden’s plants budget exceeds our wildest dreams by many 10’s of K’s). I’m still trying to process all that he packed into his lecture and although I’m inclined to use this post as a memory jog, I’ll try my best to stick to a few highlights instead.

From bare-dirt beginnings of garden design all the way through to the whys and wherefores of fuzz and variegation on foliage, Bill illustrated no-brainer suggestions and basic botany in a way that I think, like me, everyone must have been having “Why didn’t I think of that?” and “Oh, now I get it!” epiphanies at each turn of the slides. One slide from Bill’s own garden illustrated exactly how a layer of good compost on terrible hardpan has the power to transform mere dirt into soil plants will thrive in. With another set of slides Bill suggested layering a photograph of the garden site with tracing paper to sketch rough ideas. (- Now, I take dozens of pictures almost daily and I have a roll of tracing paper in my closet, but have I ever put the two together? Have you?) And because texture, much more than color, is a major garden design consideration, he also suggested using photo editing software to blur the focus and desaturate color to work out what textural elements are working in the garden and which ones aren’t. (Another idea I wish I had already had.)

He said that one way to add contrast into the garden is to include shrubs and trees in the design – something we’re all inclined to do lately for ease of maintenance reasons – the only danger being that eventually the garden could become a woodland. He recommends preserving the garden’s scale by coppicing or cutting back to the ground those shrubs and trees, during dormancy, every year or two or three. To me it really seems worth fearlessness and further research to determine which plants (such as his example of Magnolia macrophylla) respond especially well to that treatment.

I remember some of what I learned in the botany survey classes I took in college but Bill has a way of making the biology of plant processes relevant to our gardens, utterly fascinating and useful from a design standpoint. The next time any of us buys a plant we’ll be thinking of where it was grown and whether it’s been forced into a fragile stage of life. We have a better understanding of the mechanisms of foliage and how that determines placement within our gardens, and he illuminated some of the paths bugs – good and bad – use to find our plants. All of this is and much, much more – “everything you ever wanted to know about perennials but were afraid to ask” – is covered in his latest book and if you couldn’t make it to the luncheon, I hope you’ll at least treat yourself to a copy of that.

Did you attend the lecture or have you read any of Bill’s books? What were your favorite highlights?