A garden adventure to West Dean Gardens, Sussex, England
Come and explore the good, the bad and the downright ugly with me
Hi darling, I’m Kendall, a horticultural therapist. Here on my Substack, I share tips on how to use your garden to grow your personal power in a world that tries to keep women stuck, exhausted & burnt out. Come grab your trowel and join the rebellion, we’ve got a patriarchy to dismantle.
Welcome to the Seed, the place where you’ll learn to resource yourself in the garden using 5 minute mindful gardening activities so that you can unlock more joy in your life.
Welcome to the next instalment of my Garden Adventure series where I take you, dear reader, on a trip to an English garden and share with you the things I loved and how you can recreate them in your garden and the things I didn’t like so much and how to avoid them! This month I visited West Dean Gardens in Sussex.
Things I loved
Free entry for MH awareness week
I was heading down to Chichester (the nearest town) anyway to see my friend in her SOLD OUT run of ‘The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry’ so when I looked on the West Dean Gardens website to book a ticket, imagine my delight when I saw that entry was free for the whole of mental health awareness week. Usually £13.50 in peak season for an adult I was delighted to be saving myself some money, albeit a little trepidatious about how busy that would mean it was on a sunny Saturday in May.
It was busy, which as someone who gets easily overstimulated meant I was initially a bit panicky. But once I got past the entrance the gardens were more than big enough for everyone to spread out and for my nervous system to calm as I wandered among the plants.
I love an organisation who puts it’s money where it’s mouth is and supports all people to access nature to improve their mental health. Unlike another organisation that’s all talk and no trousers that I wrote about here. Yes it’s only one week a year, but they are a business and plants and employing people to look after them are expensive.
There’s a couple of ways you could recreate this in your garden. Invite your friends round for a BBQ or a quintessentially English afternoon tea with scones and cakes, phones away and talk to each other. It doesnt have to be mental health awareness week, just whenever you fancy. Or if you’re feeling brave you could do a garden open day and invite your local neighbourhood into your garden for a cuppa and some cake.
Either way that pang of loneliness will dissipate as you are held in the warmth of community and your mental health will improve.
Turned a dead plant into a feature
Ah panic stations, you’ve created a feature of a row of the same plant in your garden and one of them decides to die. What do you do?
You could, of course replace with another or you could turn it into a feature to help the bug life in your garden. Just like they’ve done at West Dean.
This bug hotel is full of logs, bricks, broken pot, pinecones. And although it does stick out like a sore thumb it kinda owns it. It’s there knowing it’s doing good and providing a home for the insects that will pollinate the fruit trees and plants around it. And it means that there won’t be a much younger tree growing in the line of fruit trees and throwing the balance off.
Or how about this habitat tree out on the meadow in front of the house.
This article is too long for email with lots of piccies, so download the Substack app to read it in full, plus it means you can join me for the next live episode of Adventures with Flowers TV.
Use of green manures
This is bold. Yes it’s a working garden but it is also open to the public and often in this world aesthetics is everything. But the gardeners at West Dean know that if they don’t look after their soil they won’t be getting gorgeous, plentiful harvests from the plants they grow there.
This is in the kitchen garden and two beds have been entirely planted with Phacelia tanacetifolia. This plant is a type of green manure and has been planted in soil that is lacking in nutrients to try and improve the nitrogen content. So that when the next plant is grown in there the soil has more nutrients to give to it. As far as green manures go this one is very attractive to bees and can even be used as a cut flower.
To sow it in your garden as a green manure sow the seeds by scattering them over the soil from March to September directly where you want it to grow. Just before it flowers dig the plants back into the soil so that it releases the nitrogen it has held onto back into the soil.
If you want to grow it as a cut flower to attract pollinators then sow the seeds 10cm apart and once they germinate thin the plants to 30cm. This means choosing the stronger plants to grow, and making sure they have 30cm between each other by discarding the weaker plants between them.
Note if you don’t cut the flowers and they run to seed they will self seed everywhere!
Because it is so quick growing Phacelia tanacetifolia is a great annual plant to sow into gappy borders. I talk about this more in this episode of Adventures with Flowers TV:
Live Q&A Planting out your plants
Come and join me as I answer your questions about planting out your plants.
Yellow wisteria
I am not a fan of yellow, with the exception of the sun. But this yellow wisteria was something else. Much more delicate in every way than the typical purple varieties that you see AND it smelt like sunshine.
It really made me stop and quiet my mind as I breathed in its scent on my journey under this archway. It would be ideal to grow over a pergola or garden arch in your own garden.
So if you are someone who prefers slightly unusual plants then I highly recommend giving this one a try.
Not afraid to show the messy process of gardening
West Dean is a working garden and I loved the way it showed new displays being created, bulbs curing in the greenhouse in their pots, seedlings being potted on on benches, water trays ready to dunk plants into when they needed a drink, even small trees needing a bit of extra support.
Gardening is not a fucking perfect flower show. Much like life, it’s messy, it’s chaotic at times, there’s death and destruction, and hope and resilience all at the same time.
I try to show you here and on my live videos that my garden has weeds, it has plants that die and I still make mistakes because real gardening just isn’t like the polished gardening shows we see on our TV’s.
Especially when you’re a woman and or Mother who has very little time to garden despite knowing that its good for your mind, body and soul.
So lets embrace the messy. Take the progress photos to remind you how far you’ve come, who cares if there’s weeds in it.
Gardening isn’t about creating show gardens for others to admire, it’s about slowing down, getting out there often and taking little steps towards your garden goals so that you can feel a little bit better and more powerful every day.