Diary catch up #7: Inspirational end of autumn visit to Knoll Gardens in Dorset

At the tail end of November, my parents came down to visit for a week, and mum loves a good garden visit especially if it can be enjoyed at leisure (ie without the encumbrance of a grumbling spouse who is only in it for the coffee and cake at the end...), so we often take advantage, leave dad with the children and 'do a garden' just us two.

Now, despite our  part of the world being well endowed with fabulous gardens to visit - you practically stumble over one around every corner here in Somerset alone, never mind the offerings within an hour's striking distance into Devon, Dorset and Wiltshire - however, options with appeal in the tatty end of November are fewer!  Many are closed in the 'off' season and for the ones that remain open all year round naturally the focus tends to be on the Landscape Garden area or the Woodland Walks, etc.  All of which the Engineer and I still enjoy and are ideal for marching the children around when they need to have an enforced change from the telly and the dreaded computer.

But mum's poor hip joints are not really up to a route march, and her interests tend more towards the ornamental garden scale.  She prefers lovely borders and shrubs, and a more domestic viewpoint.  But these are the very parts of the grand gardens which look much like our own gardens look in November - half dead, brown, limp and decidedly dormant!

However, I had seen in a magazine an article about Knoll Gardens near Wimborne in Dorset, which was a little further afield than our normal forays (I thought about an hour and a half, but actually it took us 2 hours to drive there), but is generally in mum and dad's former stomping ground (they spent many years in Dorset when dad was based in Poole as a Royal Marine).  More to the point, the garden focusses on the many ways to use grasses of all types and aims to be as year-round attractive as is possible - the grasses still standing and looking stunning while 'dead and dying' and only being cut back in February - and as I was quite interested in investigating using more grasses when the circle bed is eventually 're-done' I was keen to have a look at the display at this 'bad' time of year.  After all, if it can still look attractive at the end of November, then that would certainly sell the idea of grass-focussed planting to me.

Of course I took hundreds of photos - mainly for my own information to help me remember what certain plants were, and how they looked when they are 'dead'!

These are just a taster of the feel of the display gardens, the bits I particularly liked or felt appropriate to my own circumstances here at Windy Acre.  Different sections of the garden are planted up to demonstrate the various habitats and soil conditions and which species of grasses were best suited to those conditions. It's all about 'right plant, right place'.  But for me, another valuable aspect was the introduction throughout the garden of grasses with established shrubs, not just the perennial companions we often see them placed with in delicious designer gardens.  Windy Acre has a lot of established shrubs, so this was really illuminating for me to see different ways to approach plant groupings.

This photo I took especially for the Engineer - it's a family joke now, but we all know he appreciates a log pile in any location and scenario.  Even Leo suggests stopping the car occasionally on long journeys when he has spied a wood yard or log pile 'so that daddy can go and have a look  at it'...

But for me too - I do love a shrub with berries! I assumed this one was some sort of cotoneaster, but there was no label on it.

I was very intrigued by this grouping of spindle tree, abelia and grass clumps - I would never have put the shapes together but they worked really well

One of my favourite areas - a row of what must have once been specimen hollies, simply underplanted the full length of the holly 'hedge' with stipa arundinacea like a swathe of bronzey green, contrasting amazingly with the more rigid and sculptural feel of the hollies.

This pond garden area took our breath away - everything looked fantastic, even after the miserable lashing wet weather of the last few weeks.

I loved the mixture here in this extremely shady spot of the ferny conifer draping itself through the hypericum branches. These are just the sorts of things I need to fill the gaps in the woodland border

Grasses as ground cover under dense shrub canopies like this rhododendron...I liked how the grass clumps made a sort of rhythm in the planting - the same without being 'samey'...they don't merge into one another as my assortment of 'green shrubs' do, instead they punctuate the space.

Couldn't resist the colours of this Cotinus alongside the Hakonechloa - I think that's another abelia in the background, they were everywhere at Knoll.  

This central area was planting with a more 'traditional' prairie mixture of grasses and perennials, but as you can see, with the advantage of the borrowed background of the establish shrubs and trees in the rest of the garden it gives it quite a different feel, I think, to the classic Piet Oudolf type of planting.  I felt this was a much more do-able naturalistic style, more easily translatable to the domestic garden.  We do not live in a public park with acres of flattish open ground - we live in a more intimate space.

Another idea to take away - epimediums were used as ground cover everywhere at Knoll, revealing them to be very flexible candidates.  I used an epimedium as ground cover in my little shady front garden at the old house, but I had never realised how well their form associated with grasses until I saw them here.

The information board for this area was also very inspiring when I considered the issues I have at Windy Acre.  Any homemade compost I can produce - no matter how large the quantity - is dedicated first and foremost to the annual top up of the veg patch beds, whether they be vegetable, fruit or cutting beds, as I operate this area by the no dig system, so the 2 inches or so of compost mulch is sacrosanct.  Any leafmould I produce is allocated to the woodland areas, which basically constitute most of the south and west sides of the garden, and of course there is never enough anyway! I don't want to have to buy in an annual mulch for the circle bed.  At Knoll they chop down everything in February, and simply chop it up as they go, into shorter lengths just as you would if you were adding the material to the compost heap...except here they chop it and place it straight on the ground around the plants, to mulch them in situ.  Now doesn't that sound like an ideal solution for my circle bed?

I took this photo to remind myself of the growth habit of the phlomis - it looks great here 'dead' with the funny little pom pom flowerheads silhouetted against the paler golds of the grasses.  But I have only seen it before in pictures of it's summer clothes, which mainly focus on the upper stem and the flowers - I didn't realised what a ground hugging habit of foliage it has, with the flower stems rising clear of the low mat of leaves.  What another fab ground cover/weed suppressing plant!

Bergenias with grasses - gorgeous. And just my sort of bench.

The same view from right up by the bench, with the ground cover behind being a geranium carpeting beneath the skeleton of a delightfully arching shrub

I forget how lovely yellow berries can look too - when I'm busy getting carried away with the glories of red and orange hips and berries.  But Knoll is truly a golden place, and this photo captured that for me.

I am determined to return to visit again in the other seasons - I would love to observe how the grasses look within the wider garden setting for example in early spring when they've just been cut back and are just beginning to regrow, and of course also in summer.