Great Dixter

You mentioned other gardens that you absolutely love.

Great Dixter in the UK, which I've been to, which is absolutely stunning.

And then the Lotus Garden, which I'd never been to.

Oh,

And if you're in that vicinity, it's open to the public on certain days.

And it's the creation of George Shulkoff and his husband, Gerard Gerald Incandela.

And it is an English garden, very much like Great Dixter or Sissinghurst or its inspirations.

And it's on kind of a slope site.

Yeah, I have a, it's a Sneebor tool.

It's the great Dixter planting spade.

It's about 20 inches long.

It's basically halfway between a proper spade and a trowel on like a longer handle.

So in this episode, Tessa shares how her path ran from being a wedding cake designer to horticulture school, and how designing an experience for people carries straight over from events to gardens.

We dig into her summer as a student gardener at Great Dixter, from starting every day by sweeping the paths to learning to look at the border with an editorial eye.

She talks about planting in layers, packing plants closer than the tag says, and what happened when she tried Dixter's annual planting pockets in a southern perennial garden.

Tessa also walks us through her three-year-old seeded meadow, what showed up, what never did, and her plans to bring in structural grasses next.

So from listening to Garden Gab, I learned that you went to Spartanburg Community College for your degree.

Yes.

And you also got an opportunity from that to go to the wonderful Great Dixter.

And I'd love to dive into that more.

I return to this conversation to rebut a flurry of claims, largely from British horticulturists, that their compositions based on assemblages of plants from all over the world foster a greater insect diversity than gardens composed of locally indigenous plants.

As proof of their assertion, the British horticulturists typically point to a biodiversity survey conducted from 2017 through 2019 at the justly famous Great Dixter Gardens and surrounding estate in East Sussex, England, a total area of about 70 acres, which was found to support 1,001 species of insects.

This sounds impressive until you consider that Brian Stewart, when I spoke to him in 2019, had photographed and identified 400 species in his one-quarter acre garden composed mainly of native plants, and that in the seven years since, this total has climbed to 1,022, with new insects posing for his camera almost every time he ventures out his back door.

Before we continue our exploration of insect diversity, however, I want to thank Growing Greener's sponsor, the Garden Conservancy, a national nonprofit dedicated to preserving, sharing, and celebrating America's gardens and diverse gardening traditions.

Of course, there are beautiful places in England where you can visit fabulous, uh, cottage gardens.

My favorite one is Great Dixter because Christopher Lloyd is my hero, and you can see what it ... cottage gardens were like and the potential for you to grow one now.

Mm-hmm.

But, uh, the elements of the cottage garden, I think I've covered most of them there.

Um, as, as you sort of alluded to at the start of the conversation, so my background, I, I work as a kind of gardener come garden designer consultant, and I worked in, in the South East of England, so I'm kind of Rye, Romney Marsh, that kind of neck of the woods.

Um, and I come from a background where I, uh, uh, the most sig- I suppose one of the most significant elements is that I trained over at Great Dixter-

Mm

... back in the day, which was an amazing experience.

...

they s- and they supported some of my RHS training, which again, don't wanna throw shade on the RHS [laughs] right now, but, uh, yeah, the, the things that I learned at Dixter were phenomenal and have really, really set me up.

Um, I also worked as a head gardener at, um, Brickwall in Northiam, so the same village as, uh, Great Dixter.

Uh, it's, it's so great.