There are three types of plant I have never wanted in my garden: dwarf conifers, heathers and most of the ornamental grasses. In dank February I sat indoors reading a fine book about a garden majoring on all three; it was so good that my convictions began to waver. So I have just been to see the garden it described. Old prejudices are said to die hard. The more I garden, the easier I find it is to discard them. I have now seen good reasons for tempering my trinity of hates.
In 1966, young Adrian Bloom, just marrying, began to lay out a garden in a bare field in Norfolk. Fifty-seven years later, he has seen it grow, sometimes too vigorously, and become a destination for up to 20,000 visitors a year. In our mobile millennium, few gardeners remain for long in a garden which they have made from nothing. He has been beset by deer and squirrels meanwhile, but not by that ultimate enemy of a long tenure, honey fungus. To deter deer, he hangs chunks of scented soap in muslin bags above individual plants. Deer avoid the scent, at least for a few months, whereupon the variety of soap must be changed.
When Bloom finished his manuscript about his garden, publishers were daunted by it. Like his son Richard, he is a fine garden photographer and so he had selected scores of his own colour photos to illuminate his life’s work. Denied them by publishing houses, he preferred to found Foggy Bottom Books and publish the book, Foggy Bottom, himself.
Photos and all, it has been excellently printed in Cornwall. It is packed with experienced advice, whether on the lifting of old trees’ canopies or the best varieties of dogwood for autumn colour and vivid stems in winter. I have learnt so much from it.
The garden owes a debt to its planner’s upbringing, travel and independent turn of mind. Adrian’s remarkable father Alan Bloom was famous for his nursery of perennial plants and landscaped gardens in the grounds of neighbouring Bressingham Hall. Adrian hesitated at first to join the family business but after travels in America, returned to assume a role.
In America he had encountered a place called Foggy Bottom. As the fog hung heavy over his Norfolk field, he and his intrepid wife Rosemary decided to call their home Foggy Bottom too. They helped to build the house on it, a bungalow, named, so their Norfolk builder told them, because it is “low and you ‘bung’ a low roof on it”. Their pioneering spirit then turned to the field beyond, starting with an acre of what is now a 6-acre marvel.
Adrian’s father championed curving “island” beds for perennials, whereas other gardeners used perennials as border plants usually in rectangular beds with a wall or hedge behind them. Adrian adopted the paternal style of curving lines, but not its contents. He decided to make conifers, shrubs, heathers and ornamental grasses his main themes. When Novembers hung foggily over my traditional garden in the 1970s, I used to think of coniferous Foggy Bottom and mentally wish its exponent the best of luck. To my taste at the time, it sounded grim.
When I began to write for the FT, the Blooms’ nursery in Bressingham was a pre-eminent source of the perennials I described. I felt a bond, therefore, with the newspaper’s Africa correspondent, Adrian’s sister, Bridget, who was admired for her frontline reports on the Biafran war. When she returned to London, the paper’s urbane managing director, Lord Drogheda, summoned her, she liked to recall, and asked her, “Tell me my dear, what did you wear?”
Adrian and I wore sensible boots, totalling 140 years of practical gardening between the two of us, when we walked into what this year has turned into Soggy, not Foggy, Bottom. By the entrance, two superb varieties of Judas tree were in flower, the deeper red being the Bodnant variety: would my trinity of hates be in retreat, I wondered? We then stopped by my biggest hate of all, Satan to my trinity, the black-leaved Ophiopogon planiscapus Nigrescens. It looks like inky grass.
“Look on it as a river,” Adrian told me, a favourite style of planting in his garden. Indeed his curving drift of blackness did seem to flow like a dark river past rocks with mini-conifers and some remarkable trees and shrubs behind. The most remarkable are the Giant Redwoods, grown from seed brought home from the US in 1954. A fine red-flowered camellia stood to one side of the black river. Further on in the garden, a river of crimson runs beside truly dwarf pines, a drift of the Japanese blood grass, Imperata cylindrica Rubra, which likes damp ground. It is spectacular.
Subordinating myself to the owner’s quiet aesthetic, I became aware of the interplay of 50 shades of green and several well-placed shades of yellow, especially from fine-leaved golden maples, a fern called Dryopteris wallichiana Jurassic Gold and a gold-leaved variety of lily of the valley. The curving lines of the plantings give depth to the main vistas. The columns of yew or Italianate cypress and the pyramidal shapes of low-growing conifers vary the view as flowers never could. As a photographer, Adrian is especially alert to the effect of light. As sun broke through the rain, I saw why.
Flowers are present, but often on shrubs which Adrian encountered on his travels for new plants around the world. The American yellow-flowered Magnolia x brooklynensis Yellow Bird is in superb flower, as are bushes of a viburnum with greenish-white snowballs, a variety of tomentosum Nanum noticed in New York.
In this carefully planned company, ornamental grasses lost their brashness. So I asked the expert to name a few winners for grass-loving FT gardeners who have suffered patiently from this column. Stipa tenuissima was a first choice, remarkably fluffy as the season progresses, and Pennisetum orientale was another. With them he ranked Panicum virgatum Northwind and Molinia caerulea sub species caerulea. None is invasive, I was assured, and each is readily available, not least by mail order from Bressingham Gardens, now run by Jason, Adrian’s son. In the bewildering range of grasses on offer, these expert choices are invaluable.
Foggy Bottom is not a wilded garden nor a messy prairie. Some of the so-called “dwarf” conifers eventually grew too big and had to be culled, but the book guides you to what you can expect to stay small. I love to see a garden whose owners have followed a vision of their own making, not one copied from photos, the Chelsea Flower Show or others’ famous successes.
“How has your relation to it all changed with age?” I felt entitled to ask. “I see more,” was the answer, “with more time to notice and more idea of what to look for.” We stopped by a once-lovely Acer griseum, dying after flooding in this torrential year. “Will you replace it?” I asked, with not so many years in which to see a substitute. “Of course,” its owner replied.
It is a good way forward: focus on life, not death, personally as well as in the garden.
“Foggy Bottom”, £50, postage included, available from foggybottomgarden.co.uk.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram