A Beautiful Obsession is out, the book I wrote with and about Jimi Blake last year. In time for Christmas if you need a present for a gardening friend. Hint, hint. Actually its been out for a bit now and getting good reviews. What I'm particularly happy about is the design, by Michelle Noel for Filbert Press; it's colourful, dynamic and modern. Just like its subject.
It was Anna Mumford, who runs Filbert Press, who first suggested we work together on a book. Jimi has done garden writing himself but confessed that he was just too busy gardening, running tours, doing lectures etc. to write anymore himself.
Jimi, for those who haven't yet come across him, is the voice of gardening in Ireland. He is a total plant nut and has a terrific gift for communicating his enthusiasm to others. Researching the book with him was a rather breathless experience as I constantly had the feeling I couldn't keep up, and then he goes and digs up a huge border in the garden and replants it! Nothing stays the same for long at Hunting Brook Gardens, which is where he has been garden making since 2002. Jimi is an innovator, but he also gets bored quickly. Fortunately there is enough space here for some long-term experimental planting as well as borders that get rethought and replanted every few years.
Jimi can be iconoclastic. I first saw the garden and met him when he was just coming out of his perennial and grass phase. He can be surprisingly critical of many of the late summer perennials which most of rate so highly and he cannot understand why people would want to plant the same dahlia cultivars every year. His own dahlias are increasingly a dynamic mix rather than a set of cultivars; he like to save seed of good single dahlias and sow some every year – genepool rather than cultivar gardening.
If all you saw was the planting around the house you might think Jimi was completely focussed on exotica - but there is a lot more to him and Hunting Brook Gardens
Visiting at the time of year when Hunting Brook is at its height, late summer, the visitor might be excused for thinking that this is one of those west coast mild climate gardens. Not really; Jimi was very quick to point out to me on an early visit that this is nearly a thousand feet (300m) high, and “one of the coldest gardens in Ireland”. So any exotica you do see is likely to be hard won, and a realistic proposition for many others. A love of big leaves and bright colour combinations dominates the summer-orientated plantings around the house, and there are many components here which are either annual or half-hardy, and therefore can be, and inevitably, will be, changed every year. Further into Jimi's considerable acreage of woodland there is a lot more long-term thinking going on. A shaded area just behind the house is home to a rich collection of spring-flowering plants, including erythroniums and trilliums which need long-term commitment to growing and propagating. Jimi sees this area as not just an end in itself but as somewhere to produce plants he can then plant out down in the steep shaded valley he has. He thinks big and clearly envisages drifts of woodland plants.
Another long-term aspect of what Jimi is doing it growing many exciting evergreen species, particularly Araliaceae. This whole family somehow seems to have been largely ignored in the great era of late 19th/early 20th century plant hunting. Think every variant of Fatsia japonica your imagination can come up with. Mostly of New Zealand or east Asian origin, this dramatic group of plants has great potential for garden or landscape use, with plenty being hardy enough for quite extensive use.
Jimi is like a one-man R&D department for ornamental horticulture. He's not alone in the family as a plantsman however. The book is dedicated to his mother Kathleen, and his sister June has a garden on the other side of the hill with a growing reputation. A family to watch.
Down in the woodland is where the real long-term interest of Hunting Brook will be, as Jimi plants out more and more Araliaceae and other relatively untried foliage plants.
Photo credits to Bernard van Giessen and Richard Murphy whose pictures illustrate the book - find out more here.