An eco-friendly garden that looks like a classic, traditional garden

Many gardeners today are looking for new ways of gardening, either to make things easier, to make things more environmentally friendly or wildlife friendly, or to deal with the extremes of weather that we're certainly getting here in the United Kingdom. So I'm talking to Carol Bruce who's just written a book called In Nature's Slipstream about how she created her award-winning garden over 20 years without deadheading, watering or feeding, and it's completely resistant to hosepipe bands and sudden droughts. This garden is in southeast England where our winters rarely go below minus 6 Celsius 21 Fahrenheit and our summers at the moment average mid-20 Celsius but we're getting a lot of heat waves and we're really lurching from heat waves and drought in the summer to really rain sodden winters which is pretty tough on any garden. However Carol's method works whether your garden is frozen solid in the winter or whether you have year-round tropical gorgeousness. At the heart of it is allowing plants to self-seed and evolve so that they grow in your garden exactly where they want to grow. The astrantias Carol is showing me are the great-great-grandchildren of astrantias she planted from seed around 20 years ago so they've evolved to be exactly right for that position in the garden. But this is not about rewilding or letting things go because it's still a garden and when Carol was devising this system she also worked out what actually makes a garden, what makes people feel that something's a garden. So let's find out more about Carol's system and how we can use it in our own gardens. I've got a beautiful photograph on the front of the rose garden and I think actually I chose this photograph because it's such a good illustration of how my gardening system works. Apart from the shrubs everything on that photograph is self-sown. They're self-sown species and they're allowed to basically set seed and self-sow all over the garden which means that they're evolving, they are following natural speed distribution mechanisms, they're following exactly the rule of nature in terms of the life cycle of the plants, they're choosing where they grow which is wonderful and all I had to do was choose which combination of species to effectively seed my system with at the very beginning. And what I've done is I've created a set of design principles and maintenance techniques that mean that I've effectively harnessed the natural processes rather than disrupted them. Traditional gardening methods are explicitly designed to disrupt natural processes, so for example you deadhead plants to stop them setting seed and a classic example is named varieties are clones of one individual within an entire population of a species, it's selected and the gardener is encouraged to maintain just that one individual by lifting and dividing and because I don't have a background in gardening, I'm a scientist by nature, I'm a systems engineer by nature, this is how I come at everything, I was so inspired by the health and the vibrancy in the surrounding countryside and I thought I'm crazy why am I stopping these processes from operating in my garden, this is insane, why am I inserting myself at that point in the gardening process, what I need to do is I need to find a way to harness those processes within my garden by changing the paradigm really, I think that was what hit me is actually there's no conflict between environmental gardening and the aesthetics in a garden, it's caused by the fact that the old gardening system is an old paradigm that's no longer relevant and we need a new way of thinking about it and that's really what I did, benefiting from the fact that I had no knowledge and no experience so I wasn't already being steered by a knowledge base that I had invested in personally or that I felt confident because I had, all I had was an innate ability to analyse systems, a natural focus on systems, I'm a macroeconomist by training so I'm quite used to thinking about the world economy as a global system and I naturally step into everything I do from that position so for me to actually step into gardening with my three acres scruffy field and my head full of gardens, it was such an obvious way for me to approach the project which is okay, I need to design a system, I need to work out the constraints, I need to work out the components, how it's going to work, put it all together and for me always the first thing with any system is the constraints and the first one was absolutely no watering, reason being I grew up in West Sussex in the 1980s and saw repeated hosepipe bans, witnessed the damage it did to people's gardens, to their morale, to their engagement and their sense of emotional closeness with their garden because it was so devastating that you never knew if a hosepipe ban was going to come along and destroy all your hard work and I was in my teens very impacted by this, very affected by this, I love flowers, I love gardens but I thought if I ever have the chance to create a garden I'm going to make sure that my garden isn't dependent on piped water, the one thing I learned then was it's not actually water availability that's the problem, it's water dependency so I decided I'm going to design a system that's not ever dependent on water and my next constraint was that because there was no garden here at all when I came here I decided I could only do what I could look after myself and it really I thought it would be too much creating a garden from nothing if I wasn't going to look after it myself, I had no business doing it at all really so that right from the beginning was my constraint which is it has to be just something that I know that I'm on top of this how I'm going to manage this system and what the actual hours on the ground are the nuts and bolts of how I'm going to look after it. It's three acres and I do it myself in five hours a day so basically if people can do the math they can realize that basically if they've got a fifth of that they can do it in an hour a day. What is very interesting in the book you actually define the difference between a cultivated garden and nature and that actually shows that really kind of sums up the project I think it's very good guidance for people so could you just go through your this is a cultivated garden and this is a nature point? Yes absolutely what I realized was that if I was going to effectively adopt natural systems in my garden and adopt natural processes as the operating system of my garden if you like that's all well and good I'm devoted to nature and I didn't want to in any way interfere with it but at the same time for me gardening is a very artistic activity so I needed to keep control of the way it looked and I really have put a lot of thought into what is it about a space that gives it gardenhood and realized that there are heuristics mental shortcuts that are instant triggers of gardenhood when you see them you walk into a space and you see certain things and before you've consciously registered your brain has already told you you're in a garden and I thought I need to pick out what those triggers are and make sure that I use those to construct a system of design techniques which will provide containment for the natural processes so that visually it looks like a well-maintained traditional garden but at the same time I've managed to incorporate the natural processes within my philosophy and my maintenance methods and I think for me once I realized that I had a list of the design techniques that I needed to incorporate such as very strong lines of sight and all of these things are evidence of human hand heart and mind the evidence of the relationship between a human and a piece of ground and I think that is what defines gardenhood that you can see and you can feel that this place on an instinctive level you can feel that it's the territory of a human it's it's currently occupied it's loved it's maintained the owner hasn't been carted off nobody's died and nobody's realized you know when you drive past a garden that's all shabby you instantly think that the house is empty there seems to be a lot of instincts at work there which we're not fully aware of but I realized that if I could get a clear understanding of the gardenhood triggers and I could create design techniques that would guarantee that gardenhood feeling as long as I had those as the containment and the framework within which the wild processes were operating then I could have the best of both worlds and my understanding of it is having formulated this the reason there is so much resistance to current advice on how to incorporate nature into a garden and how to be more environmentally friendly is because the techniques trample on the gardenhood triggers so you instantly see an unmown lawn or you instantly see weeds in the flowerbed and we are wired to react against that that is evidence of a neglected garden on a very instinctive level and talking to visitors on the NGS open days every single one of them says I love my garden I would never do that to my garden which I think is a very gut reaction people are put in a position where there's a conflict between I love my garden I love the planet why am I being forced to choose and you don't have to choose and that was really what drove me to think okay I'm designing a system I'm devoted to nature on the one hand it has to be something I have artistic control over on the other how do I create a system that integrates those two and I can create a garden which by starting from scratch and basically putting all possibilities on the table I can create a system whereby you can have both of those two things and they actually the two parts work together to amplify the overall effect lovely and I think you've actually summed it up very well so I'm just going to read a list from the book you have listed them as focal points restricted color schemes geometry strong hard landscaping so presumably things like paths yeah well thought out lines of sight and layout livery this is an interesting one using the same plant supports benches paving slabs etc throughout to give a sense of cohesion a few highly visible and highly manicured elements such as the freshly mown lawn that you've said yes absolutely no weeds which is an interesting one and then you go on to the nature side and the first one is no interference in the growing conditions which is really a sort of extension of right plant right place isn't it um growing perennial species instead of named varieties which is very interesting as in case people don't know a species is the original plant isn't it and then people as you say bred them yeah and and therefore that point is vital to the system it really is no deadheading self-seeders mingling plant populations not individuals this is a really interesting one because you've made the observation that plants grow in huge clumps and of course garden designers are always telling us plant a big clump and of course that's what nature wants you to do as well so it's really interesting I think that the nature has actually echoed into the visual into the visual yes it's been fascinating I think that the absolute key in terms of why this system works the it would work without this element but nowhere near as well is the fact that I'm using genetically diverse populations of perennial species to for the entire herbaceous understory rather than name varieties with the intention that they will evolve in lockstep with climate change and something I realized was that mother nature's uh tried and tested adaptation mechanism of survival of the fittest natural selection by survival of the fittest is there to be had but we're snapping off the seed pods what we need is a genetically diverse population that so natural selection has got something to select from then every year no watering no fertilizer no interference with seedlings everything is then every year what happens is that those that are best suited to the conditions in this here this now are the ones that will thrive and create the seeds in the gene pool for the for the future and it has worked so wonderfully I am so happy with the way it turned out particularly in the rose garden in 2023 there was a hose pipe ban and a heat wave and I think there was 42 degrees something ridiculous it was really really hot and it was a brilliant test for the rose garden which had been evolving the herbaceous understory had been evolving for 19 years and it was completely untouched by it which is astonishing so no watering no interference and it was absolutely fine everything was just carrying on as if nothing was happening and the reason is because everything that couldn't survive increasingly harsh conditions had already died out along the way and only plants that were left standing were the ones that were equipped for dealing with the and when I have a heat wave or a particularly stressful year in terms of weather I'm delighted because it's actually creating the stress that I need for an extra boost to the evolutionary processes that are taking place in my garden and it is wonderful because I know that that's actually going to create a flush out so anything that was just hanging on it will no longer be contributing its genes to the gene pool of that species in the garden so it works I've basically taken the natural process of natural selection evolution I've replaced the human which is that the plant has been selected by a human I've replaced it with mother nature which is how it's supposed to be how it is in the wild and I've harnessed evolution as my resilience technique by allowing that to happen but of course with the garden hood triggers it's all color schemed there are strong lines of sight there are box balls everywhere there's no way that you would walk into my rose garden and know that I've done that because it's bringing those two together in a way whereby the visual garden hood triggers provide such strong containment that they impact you so suddenly and so completely that actually it's all right to be that close to nature being wild and tooth and claw it's fine because you're not going to lose control of the humanness of the space and those two things work together at this point I'd just like to explain about shrubs perennials and annuals shrubs are plants with a woody stem that stays above the ground all year round and they generally don't self-seed they're things like box you hydrangeas magnolias roses perennials are plants that live in your garden for three years or more and quite often go underground in the winter and these are the ones that carol is planting from seed and allowing to self-seed and then there are also annuals and biennials annuals sprout flower set seed and die in one year and biennials do it in two and in terms of being inspired by your local nature people watch this channel from all over the world from south africa from australia from canada from the states and everything like that how would you advise people to be inspired by their local nature I would say that the reason my garden is so healthy with absolutely no watering and no fertilizer etc is precisely because the plant populations here have been chosen to act exactly as the surrounding countryside does so the way you can apply my system rather than choosing to plant the same plants as me is to basically use the same method and take that method into your surrounding countryside because that's where the answer is the answer lies on the other side of your garden wall it's out there already and if you walk around the countryside nearest to your home and you look and you learn at different times of year what thrives how do things survive which environments are really very good when there's a drought or what you know when there's a lot of rain or just really study how the countryside and the natural processes in your environment deliver in terms of how they function in the biosphere and then just lift it inside it's been fascinating the process for me I think by moving the point at which there's human intervention way back into the planning stage I think what normally happens is people plant things in the heat of summer and the point of human intervention in the garden then becomes their burden with the task of watering it keeping it alive my human intervention point in my system is right at the planning stage when I'm picking which species are in the cohort that is actually going to live in this garden as a self-serving evolving population took me about four months of research and the reason is there's no amount of time you can put in at the beginning which won't be which will be wasted you can absolutely put as much effort and time in at the beginning as you can I really put a lot of work into researching where these species grow in the world what the conditions are that they evolved to live in to start with it's pure botany this isn't about going to your garden center and buying something new because it's doubly it's got a double flower it's named after someone on the telly this is absolutely going back to the the science of the thing and by doing that by by looking at the conditions in your garden and not thinking I can't grow anything because my garden is hot and dry but thinking where on earth have things involved that can live in a hot and dry place like mine and then going with that species I grow all of mine from seed it's vitally important that you get the genetic diversity from the if you possibly can reason being if you're trying to create a viable population that can evolve under pressure from climate change or from extreme conditions you need the genetic diversity in that population took about three to five years with mine before there was an explosion in diversity and it's fantastic to witness now in the rose garden 23 years later the geraniums fascinating initially I grew a tray of white flowered ones after five years they started to appear with little blue spots and dashes on the petals after eight years seedlings turned up with entirely blue flowers which is the natural color and that means that that genetic potential with lurking inside my seedlings it took eight years of crossing and recrossing for it to actually surface and manifest into a physical flower it's what's wonderful for me is I am witnessing the sheer power and dynamism of life on earth in my garden and I feel like a witness and I feel privileged that is the joy that drives us all into gardening that is the longing that is what we're seeking and to be able to have created a system that delivers purely by me surrendering to a more to something more powerful than me by me accepting that I don't know best that I'm not in control this isn't my domain that actually I'm very fortunate that mother nature lets me pick where the paths are pick the color scheme and pick the initial plants I feel simultaneously uplifted and and like I should be on my knees because I'm in an environment where I just feel I'm grateful to be part of the biosphere I feel put in my place I feel I belong to this to this environment and I feel I suppose I just feel fundamentally connected to the to the botany the biology of the thing self-seeding isn't the only part of the carol system and how she manages the rest is in nature's slipstream the book but we've talked a lot about self-seedings so if you'd like to see 25 self-seeding plants then don't miss this video coming up now and thank you for watching goodbye