Hot on the heels of the inaugural Festival of Gardens and Nature in Co Laois last month (which she co-founded with Minnie Preston) garden designer Catherine FitzGerald, of Lutyens & Fitzgerald in London and Glin Castle, Limerick, has identified three trends to think about when designing or reframing your garden this summer:
“Gravel gardens are genius: planting into gravel and sand rather than soil means less weeding, less maintenance and less compost! Just choose the right plants that are adapted to gravel: hummocks of santolina, rosemary, cardoons and creeping thyme, Iris pallida and fennel. Seed about with evening primrose and California poppies. Think Derek Jarman’s garden on the strand at Dungeness in Kent or look up what Peter Korn is doing near Malmo in Sweden.”
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“Plant single flowers for pollinators to enjoy: purer, simpler, lovelier and better for bees and insects. Think roses, poppies and gorgeous pale pink Peonia Nymph”.
“Natural organic swimming pools, surrounded by native plants: glorious stands of yellow flag iris and purple loosestrife, marsh marigold, and oxegenators such as hornwort, sweet galingale, and water crowfoot. Swim in clear water surrounded by swallows diving to drink, dragon flies, damsel flies, and if you are very lucky, newts! This is the best thing you can do for biodiversity, apart from planting a tree.”
How To Design Your Garden For Summer, According To Catherine FitzGerald
Catherine FitzGerald's Glin Castle Gardens Are a Living Wonderland How this landscape designer grows her family’s castle gardens along the River Shannon into an enchanting setting bridging generations.
In theory, landscape designer Catherine FitzGerald and I are meeting at her home in Wiltshire to talk about how gardens portray character, ahead of a talk she is giving next month at Fenton House, one of the oldest houses in Hampstead. In many ways it is the picture-perfect example of English rus in urbe — the countryside in the city. Irish-born FitzGerald has been a landscape designer for 30 years, working in particular on historic gardens
In practice, it is hard to take one’s eyes off her garden. There are plumes of foxgloves and fennel; delicate flowers that fix you with their eyes; roses sprawled over a brick wall, cut with the acid green of euphorbia; and alleyways between grasses for the eye to travel.
Look one way and it is a Gainsborough painting, the other a Poussin. There are freshly shorn sheep in a field behind, a young orchard and meadow and a striking long pond with a large terracotta urn at its head. It is a natural swimming pool commissioned by her husband, the actor Dominic West.
With the dimensions of a regular pool, it is sealed by pond liner, layered in gravel and planted with reeds. Birds, dragonflies and damselflies share the pool with the swimmer. “House martins and swallows swoop down for the insects while you are swimming,” says FitzGerald.
What is surprising is that the garden feels like it has been there for 100 years but was a lockdown project, a product of both her expertise and restlessness. She and West had bought the house, a former brewery, around eight years ago. FitzGerald wanders around pointing out mistakes she has made. A pathway here for a drive that shouldn’t be there, flowers that she keeps digging up to replant somewhere else. “Certain trees have been moved seven times,” she admits. “Gardening is not always this love for me. It’s a kind of passion and fury.”
Managed gardens and landscapes are as much an expression of what is going on with the owner or caretaker of a building as what is planted.
FitzGerald’s CV includes some high-end work: Glenarm Castle, a rewilded landscape for cabin retreats in Scotland; and gardens at very smart west London addresses. But Hillsborough Castle in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is an example of a place that needed extra love. A little-used titular home of the Northern Ireland Secretary of State, it was the setting for various stages of the Anglo-Irish peace talks.
“It seemed an austere and functional place,” says FitzGerald — “a lot of gravel, not many plants.” She and her colleagues worked on and off for five years. Espaliered fruit trees were brought; the bounty from the gardens went into the kitchens. The river was planted with tree ferns and palms. Gravel paths were filled with seeding plants and then, she recounts, there were “bees and insects and scent and grasses moving in the wind”.
It’s really transformative — a softening,” she says, not just of the garden but for the people and how they experience the building and the history.
Fenton House, by contrast, has a legacy of being rotund with contentment. Now a National Trust property, it was originally a merchant’s house, before passing into the hands of nobility to gain the reputation of being one of the finest houses in Hampstead. FitzGerald will be leading a guided walk through its gardens, which include an orchard, sunken rose garden, greenhouse and immaculate lawn.
“You take a journey through it,” says FitzGerald. It goes past formal borders, the greenhouse with new seedling being propagated, past the vegetable beds and the orchard.
Most houses enveloped by the London sprawl lost their land to development. Fenton did not. “It appeals if you like the idea of rus in urbe, of town in country. Do we live in the town with its corruption and its politics or do we go off and tend vineyards?” Fenton has both. “It evokes that fantasy about the ideal life where you have both friends and culture, but also your beds, your herbs.” A life with everything on hand.
Gardens reflect their owners’ characters, but there is also a change in the type of person who becomes a garden or landscape designer. FitzGerald is, she eventually reluctantly admits, in charge of Glin Castle in Ireland. Her father Desmond was Knight of Glin but, with no sons, the title passed with him.
Her original passion for gardening had derived from watching others working there: “Generations of people, especially women, had contributed to it.” Directionless in her twenties, she signed up to RHS’s gardening course, at Wisley, in Surrey. “I feel like it saved me.” She also did an Architectural Association course on the history of landscape and conservation and went to work for garden designer Arabella Lennox-Boyd — “a real crucible for learning” — and works in partnership with Mark Lutyens, a landscape architect.
Looking back on her training, she and her peer group were drawn from a particular group, usually already connected to the land: “Those who wanted serious training intended to become head gardeners or work on an estate.”
Among her friend group, there was minimal interest in gardens. It was all fashion and culture. “Whereas now,” she says, “because everyone is so aware of what we’ve been doing to the planet, how important it is to plant trees and to leave grass to grow long, younger people are becoming more connected to that.”
She is particularly excited by the new culture of the roving gardener, not tied to an estate but roaming the country, counselling about plants and spreading ideas far and wide. It has disrupted the system.
Her friend Jonny Bruce is one. He comes around every once in a while. “It’s like garden psychology. He’ll come. We’ll do a day’s gardening and then just talk about ideas.” He brings plants from somewhere else, he passes hers on to others. “It’s very cross-pollinating between people.”
FitzGerald and her friend Minnie Preston held the inaugural Festival of Gardens and Nature at Ballintubbert, County Laois, in central Ireland this year. Less of a “serious boffin-y conference” — as well as the deep dives into plants, the programming crossed boundaries of design, history, ecology, rewilding and plant hunting. Jimi Blake talked about woodland plants; the Land Gardeners, a duo from west London, about soil health. It drew an unusually mixed crowd. “A proper festival,” she says proudly. Folk musician Johnny Flynn came and played.
Her own garden takes on this energy and inclusiveness. There are cardoons for structure and diaphanous fennel. The wild flower meadow in the new orchard has some non-natives — giant inula, marsh euphorbia — in it. She likes startling combinations of colour.
The natural pool had came about after West contacted David Pagan Butler, a pioneer of natural swimming pools online. There’s also a pig pen round the back and a greenhouse. The completeness of the garden — for food, flowers and life — resembles Fenton in many ways except for its refusal of contentedness as an end point.
FitzGerald says “I’m always searching for something wild. Gardens are all about change — the minute they become static, they lose their spirit.”
Catherine FitzGerald will be speaking at the Idler Festival; idler.co.uk