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Into the Woods For nearly all my adult life, deep in the recesses of my mind, I have harboured the desire to find an established wood and make a garden there. I long ago lost count of the many woods and forests I have wandered through, dreaming of the kind of garden that I could create under their branches. I suspect that many other gardeners share this dream. For many of us, woods and trees evoke powerful, often deeply subconscious, emotional responses. If you have a romantic inclination, you cannot fail to be moved by the moss-covered, rock-strewn gnarled oak woodlands occasionally found on the uplands of the wetter western side of the United Kingdom. Or feel as I did spiritually moved, even reverential, when dwarfed by the towering magnificence of the redwoods in northern California, the horticultural equivalent of a grand cathedral. A garden created below or among trees taps into these deep emotions to provide an uplifting and also gently protective experience that gardens without trees can never achieve.Discovering Woodlanders When I left university I took up the post of head gardener at the Garden House in the southwest corner of England. It was a well-established garden on a cool, north-facing slope and it had many mature trees over 100 years old. Planted beneath the trees was an enviable collection of the best forms available at the time of many woodland plants. Like many garden owners on acidic soils, Lionel and Katharine Fortescue had a special fondness for trees and shrubs, especially camellias, magnolias and rhododendrons. In this damp part of the country, with its acidic soils, these woody plants thrive, but having previously gardened on alkaline soils the Fortescues also grew a wide range of perennials and some bulbs. Notable among this latter category were the erythroniums, especially the pink Erythronium revolutum. Multitudes of these graceful lily-like flowers emerged that first spring we were there, intermingled with drifts of blue chionodoxa and pale yellow primroses. As a relative newcomer to woodland plants, I was completely hooked. Like many of the recently converted, my enthusiasm for this new passion knew no bounds. As I visited gardens in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, I saw more and more new woodland plants. I wanted to grow them all, but the original garden at the Garden House was already fully planted. It also became clear that the techniques we were using for growing the perennials did not suit many of the plants we were acquiring. Clearly there was no one method that was appropriate for every woodland plant and I needed to determine which conditions were needed for each to thrive. By visiting and studying plant communities in the wild, gleaning as much information as possible from experienced growers and then experimenting in an extension to the garden, bit by bit I started gaining some level of success with these woodlanders. Eventually we moved from the Garden House to establish a nursery and garden at nearby Wildside on a south-facing field where I hoped to grow our sizeable collection of woodland plants in as natural a setting as possible. But there was not a tiny piece of shade to be had. With no time to wait for trees to grow to a perfect high canopy, I had to create shade as fast as possible. In order to create a woodland garden where there was formerly an open field, I used a number of techniques which I believe can be implemented by gardeners elsewhere, including those with much smaller plots and even tiny spaces. Similarly, my hope in writing this book is that it opens up avenues of thinking about shade and woodland gardening which you may not have considered before. Books can only offer guidelines and this one is based on my experiences of growing woodlanders for over forty years, and how I might like to grow them in the future. The Nature of Woodlands The mention of “woodland” may conjure up romantic images of mature beeches or oaks carpeted below by swathes of bluebells (in northwestern Europe) and trilliums or other wildflowers (in North America). Ancient woodlands or old-growth forests with venerable trees, wherever they occur in the world, represent the traditional vision of deeply shaded woodland. But in fact these ancient forests are relatively scarce, and woodlands come in many different shades. In the United Kingdom, familiar wooded landscapes include coppiced woods, where the trees are cut to the ground on perhaps a fifteen-year cycle, and forestry plantations (both coniferous and deciduous). In North America, the tremendous diversity of forested land includes the eastern deciduous forest, the coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest, the high-elevation aspens of the southern Rockies, and the pine woods found in the Northeast and through the southern states as far as Florida, among others. But these densely forested areas are not the only woodland habitats. There are also less obvious opportunities for creating woodland conditions, such as fruit orchards, loose aggregations of small trees on the moors or mountainsides and marginal land partly colonized by shrubby trees like hawthorns (Crataegus laevigata) in the United Kingdom, for instance, or by scrubby pinyon in the Sierra Nevadas. The UK Forestry Commission defines a woodland as “land under stands of trees with a canopy cover of at least 20 percent (or having the potential to achieve this), including integral open space, and including felled areas that are awaiting restocking”. Interestingly, “there is no minimum height for trees to form a woodland at maturity, so the definition includes woodland scrub.” There is also no minimum size for a woodland, so areas down to as little as a quarter of an acre (0.1 hectares) are included in the UK statistics. Elsewhere in the world, the definition of a woodland varies from a canopy cover of 10 to 50 percent and a minimum height at maturity up to 16 ft. (5 m). In many of these technical definitions, there is actually a very small percentage of shaded area. Clearly in many woods there are significant areas open to the sky. How can such technical definitions affect how we think about woodland gardens? Well, acknowledging that woodlands are diverse and complicated is a first step towards broadening our attitudes about what can be considered a woodland garden. Observing plants in their native habitats may also challenge established wisdom about what could thrive in a garden setting. Many of the shrubs, perennials and bulbs commonly classified as “woodlanders” or “shade plants” come from a range of different habitats, from deepest shade to open hillside. Even many of the classic woodland plants grow in forest clearings where they may be in full sun for many hours at a stretch and, indeed, these glades may be where the greatest range of plant species is found in native woodlands. For this book, I define a woodlander as any plant that will grow and (if relevant) flower happily in a semi-shady site without looking incongruous.
