Another visit to another incredible, ground-breaking garden… and a fantastic follow-up to my recent visit to @joshua_sparkes at Birch Farm.

This time, thanks to a bright spark (Jill) at the @gdnmediaguild we were lucky enough to visit Hilldrop in Essex and its creator, John Little.
It’s hard to know where to start… though, I can say without hesitation, I finished the day feeling as if i was floating on a cloud of positivity. And fired up to go home and look at my own garden in a completely different light, again (Birch Farm had a similar effect).

John’s brilliant talk, before we toured the garden, caused a few chins to drop… and we certainly had our accepted wisdom challenged. He’s a disrupter of the best kind. Alongside running the @greenroofco John set up @carenotcapital to teach professional & municipal gardeners ‘everything but horticulture’. Check out their Insta to find out more and / or donate.

The garden / space at Hilldrop, as well as featuring an array of green-roof structures, is a tapestry of wild flowers, ‘weeds’, standing deadwood, insect & reptile habitats… rubble piles, rubble walls… (Check out the pics, as it’s hard to sum up). It’s so far from a conventional or formal garden — and so refreshing. The pond features a shopping trolley, with resident moorhen & eggs. The view out over the Essex countryside is the perfect backdrop too.
Our group was completely transfixed — and full of questions.

Walking around — on a baking hot day — you could almost feel the abundance of insects, microorganisms and reptiles. One of John’s slides mentioned the importance of ‘getting into bed with your entomologist’ which raised a few smiles… (It seems we have an entomologist friend in common too — the wonderful @ericamcalister )

Thank you John!
I believe the garden is open ‘by appointment’. It was a privilege to be shown round. If you get a chance to visit, do. We should all be taking a leaf out of John’s book… ...

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What a complete eye-opener it was, going to visit Birch Farm / @joshua_sparkes in North Devon. I’ve been dying to visit for some time, having heard great things about the place — and its approach to growing — for sometime. Our friend @thehappyhermit had worked there for a few months during her horticultural travels and the head gardener is the lovely Josh Sparkes who said hermit had worked with at Sissinghurst.
To say it’s a far cry from Sissinghurst is an understatement — it’s a whole different approach to growing, and growing food in particular.

There’s too much to summarise here — you really should book on a tour (and lunch at The Farmer’s Arms part of the @collectiveatwoolsery — but the overriding theme is a ‘food forest’ where fruits, nuts and herbs are grown together in a multilayered ecosystem that’s super wildlife friendly too. In principle there are seven layers of vegetation: canopy, understory, shrub, herbaceous, ground-cover, root & vine layers. It involves minimal intervention — and shade, particularly in our changing climate, is key.
Our ‘take home’? Don’t be ashamed of your weeds, experiment with inter-planting and learn to love shade.
I’m definitely going to be reading up on this incredibly interesting subject — and our garden at home is going to be transformed!
Thank you Josh, Jay and the team. We felt welcome (as did the Blooming Dog II) ...