Nature and nurture in Ham House garden

Why blog about this? Who would be interested… It’s giving me a single point on which to rest and take stock during a time when there have been no points to stop, or to step back and consider. Before I attempt to switch off the last three months in Ham House Garden are worthy of a quick reflection.

In March I wrote about the garden closing just as the spring bulbs were blooming. Today, the garden re-opened in early summer: we are harvesting gooseberries and cutting roses. More than any other time, the last three months have shown that gardens are for people, not just gardeners.

This spring the locked-down members of the population are all likely to be becoming a bit more like gardeners. Not just because of the time we might have to be at home in whatever our garden is for us, from house plant to small yard to multiple acres. This year everybody is more like a gardener because we are all having ideas and making plans about how to make next spring better while this ...

In our garden there are at least 200,000 bulbs flowering – I just can’t see them. We closed the property down on Tuesday this week to most staff, having closed it to visitors on Saturday when almost 1000 people turned up to enjoy the colours, scents and space. In less than 16 gated acres these numbers represent too many challenges: the outdoors suddenly took on indoor characteristics, where ...

Rosie Fyles, Head Gardener at Ham House in London, is often asked if early winter is a quiet period in the garden. Assumptions are made that the bulbs are all already in, herbaceous growth is dying back (or cut down), the mower blades are on their sharpening leave and it’s too wet and cold for hedge-cutting, surely?

As a custodian of Ham House's historic garden, with 400 years of cultivation before me, I'm noticing changes in the way the plants here are behaving. Luckily, I'm also discovering there's plenty we can do to adapt.

A historic, formal garden - straight lines, topiary shapes, clipped hedges, repeated planting sequences - is not a place you would immediately associate with 'gardening for nature'. At Ham House and Garden near Richmond in Surrey, we're seeking to change this.