Shropshire Magazine

An English country garden in June . . . Stuart Jones has created a masterpiece that takes climate change into account.

Ken Tudor talks to a gardener who knows change when he see it . . . and knows what to do about it

The moves by Shropshire gardener Stuart Jones to fight the effects of climate change which threatens England’s “green and pleasant land” are to be highlighted on a top TV gardening programme.

The ways that Stuart is working in his marvellous garden on the Chyknell Estate near Claverley has interested members of the Cottage Garden Society, one of Britain’s most respected gardening groups.

And when the BBC’s Gardeners’ World TV team were looking for people combating the effects of the changing climate, the society referred them to Stuart, one of the most knowledgeable of local gardeners.

As the world’s expert scientists argue the case for climate change the gardeners know that something is happening – because the seasons have gone crazy, with warm spells in winter and springs which are very, very warm as they were in 2007 or very, very dismal like this year.

Stuart and Val Jones in the garden.

People like Stuart and his wife Val know that when it rains the entire summer and the vegetable plot production line is halted by the dreadful conditions, then all is not well with the weather machine up in the skies.

Over the last two years this remarkable self-taught gardener has seen the energy-sapping hottest summer on record in 2006 and the dreadfully dismal wet weather of last summer.

“Climate change has had significant effects and there is no doubt about it,” he says. “We only have to look around the garden and see the range of plants which have again easily survived the winter.”

He reels off a list of plants that are happy in the fast-draining soil at Chyknell and then lists plants that were dreadfully affected by the wet and windy days of summer 2007, including many vegetables such as marrows, squashes and courgettes.

“It is all changing and we need to really look at it carefully,” he says. “Over the years we have seen more plants surviving the winter, specimens which traditionally we had to move indoors.

“Now we have things like Geranium palmatum, and the variegated myrtle getting through the winter,” he explains. “There’s Cedronella, a lovely plant I got from the Cottage Herbery with a label saying it was a tender perennial and had to be protected from frost.

“But it has come through the last few winters okay and that is another sign of how the climate has changed for the gardener,” he adds.

“It’s the same with the salvias and the penstemons, which were considered tender but now I leave them in and they are perfectly okay. I have a border of cannas and dahlias which I always lifted but now I mulch them and leave them in.”

So there’s no doubt that the changing climate and environment is enabling people to get more of their tender favourites through the winter – but there’s a threat to the plants which could be hit by warmer and drier summers.

And Stuart says that the problem can be fought, at least in the foreseeable future.

“The answer is to put lots of humus into the soil, and we do that by mixing homemade compost with the tons of manure we have available, and trench it in large quantities,” he says.

“Then equally important is the need to mulch the beds over with the same material so that all the available moisture is kept in the soil.”

The advice for gardeners anxious to make the most of their gardens during hot, dry summers is to plant grey-leaved lovelies from the Mediterranean countries. But there are threats to them from periods of rains like we had in April when the tap was only infrequently turned off at the main.

Yes, it is a matter of trial and error in many ways but Stuart can see that it will only be hard work that will see us gardeners through if we do have a series of hot summers.

“When I am working away on the trenching and mulching in January and February it is hard work, but I can see that it is the only way of making sure that the plants have a chance of surviving,” he admits.

Stuart is speaker and events organiser for the Shropshire branch of the Cottage Garden Society and recently managed to coax Fergus Garrett, gardener at Great Dixter, the glorious garden of the late Christopher Lloyd who died last year.

It was the great ‘Christo’ who inspired Stuart to even higher levels, after he was spotted by the great man taking notes at the garden of TV gardener Sarah Raven.

Banana plants tower over the rest of the garden.

They got talking and Stuart was invited to stay at Great Dixter, where they got on so well they continued to swop gardening ideas. Now he has a section of his garden called Little Dixter, which is full of hot colour in summer similar to the beds created by the gardening guru.

He also has a bed where he grows plants from hotter areas – echevarias, bromelliads and aeoniums – planted in fast-draining soil, augmented with gravel and mulched with stones.

The ferns and bananas like to have leaf mould, as does the lancewood tree, a Pseudopanax crassifolium, a plant from New Zealand. “I surprised Christo with this one – it s a nice tree with thin serrated leaves and its stem was used by the Maoris as a lance, hence its name,” he explains.

“It’s a bit of a Marmite tree – meaning that you either like it or hate it.”

Then nearby is a Tetrapanax papyrifer, the rice paper tree, enjoying life in the beds they share with bananas and ferns.

It is a great garden – it was in the final six of 20,000 entries in the Daily Mail Gardening Competition – and Stuart and Val are determined that it will remain so, whatever the weather.