The sand garden tough beautiful low maintenance

Sand gardening, gravel gardening, concrete rubble gardening, all those aggregates, it's some of the most interesting experiments being done in gardening today and actually all of them work in a very similar way. You would layer 10 centimeters or more of the sand or the gravel or the concrete rubble onto your borders, you would plant tough resilient plants and then they will grow very compact, they'll flower a lot, they won't need watering, they won't need feeding. It's quite a revolutionary way of looking at growing in gardens. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and I went to the beautiful West Dean Gardens in Sussex to talk to head gardener Tom Brown about sand gardens. The video came out last year and you had hundreds of questions so we went back to see West Dean Gardens and to see the sand garden at a different time of year and to ask Tom for the answers to those questions. West Dean Gardens are open to the public and it's attached to the West Dean Arts College where you can do diplomas, degrees or even short courses and the new entrance to the West Dean Gardens is through their craft shop. Tom himself is not only head gardener, he's a gardening writer for the Daily Telegraph and he also is the author of gardening books. With this sand and rubble gardening he's really done the research but he's created them in domestic sized areas within the West Dean Gardens and of course he now has the real life experience of what it's like gardening with aggregates like sand, concrete rubble and gravel. So let's find out more. So we're back here again at West Dean College and to start off a lot of people have asked can you put sand onto an existing bed or do you have to dig up everything in the bed and clear it completely? I think the principle is that you are growing plants without that need to add organic mulches or irrigate the planting so if your shrubs are established and they've got an established root system and they don't require that kind of intensive fertilising and irrigating then there's no reason why they can't be part of a new community of plants. So you don't absolutely have to clear it but you might be wise to take any of the really fussier plants out or the ones that need a lot of feeding? Yeah very much and shade might be sort of a consideration as well. So with our sand garden it's in the the open sun so all of the plants there are sun worshippers really so they can cope with that hot dry condition. If you just start to have a canopy particularly with leaf litter that might be slightly more problematic and in all honesty the effect might be slightly compromised so I suppose there's that decision to make. The next one is how is sand gardening different from gravel gardening and indeed you've also got the concrete bubble garden here and you're actually about to start a chalk garden aren't you? So what's the difference between those subspace? Mostly aesthetic actually but principally it is growing a group of plants that get their roots down deep and they've got more resilience to the extremes of hot and dry summers and the wet winters. Quite a few people also commented that they said oh is that sand it looks like gravel but actually it is sand isn't it it's just that it's sort of balled up and it looks like little stones but if you you hold them you just sort of rub them and sand comes pouring out. It's sort of a naturally occurring sand and you find that it caps on the surface which is beneficial to locking in in that moisture but yeah you start to then break that sand up and it goes down into granular sand. Do you have to ensure that it's all completely weed free and if so how do you do that? Again it's that kind of preparation and I think if you're going to commit to this style of gardening and it doesn't have to be your whole garden it can just be a maybe just the sunny part of your garden and a proportion of it the more perennial weed that you can eradicate the more successful that project will be in the longer term because if those perennial weeds are deep rooted in in the soil below you're always going to be compromised and so it's worth building that strong foundation before you start start to expect the kind of results that you can so it's worth taking a little bit of extra time to get that right so we with our new flint and chalk garden for example we had acanthus mollus and we also have bindweed in the plot so I took an extra year to eradicate that or touch wood eradicate that because if you don't make those strong foundations early on you're going to constantly be chasing your tail and regretting that you didn't spend a little bit longer getting that right. So is that literally just digging up every weed when it arrives or did you use a membrane or did you use a chemical weed killer? So we use a principle of not letting anything see a Sunday so the more you can sort of something photosynthesizes the more it can feed those big roots which can be problematic in a garden but with chemical control and herbicide it's not something that we reach for in the first instance but in terms of creating a border or a garden that'll have great wildlife benefit in the longer term I am not adverse to using some chemical treatments occasionally to control the bindweed and the acanthus to make sure it's absolutely gone knowing that we're going to be investing in the gardening investing in biodiversity in the longer run. So it's basically hand weeding but a bit of chemical if you just simply cannot get it shifted? To be honest whatever you need to do in some ways and membranes would work very well and we've used those in other parts of the gardens but again you're looking at probably a couple of years to really exhaust those perennial weeds before you can confidently plant in them. And of course when you come to put the sand and the gravel on you would take the membrane up it's not like a weed suppressant membrane as in the old days. One of the things that people have asked is they say well won't the sand or the gravel or the concrete won't it just eventually sink into the soil and if it does does that damage worms microorganisms and also does it change the pH of the soil particularly with the rubble type? So in my previous jobs it's fair and worth growing crops if you like and looking at adding lime and looking at pH it's very easy to push pH up so very easy to sort of get a soil more alkaline so where you're adding more concrete or chalk or flint for example the pH can go up and it's very difficult to then bring that down again but with the sand it's slightly acidic that we're using here but it's unlikely that it's going to interfere with the pH to any great extent and you're absolutely right we're not adding any organic matter to the soil to improve the sort of the fungi and the activity in that way but what we are doing is capping the soil which then protects the soil from erosion and I think also helps sort of protect some of the microorganisms in there because we're not constantly cultivating or trampling or compacting and that sort of thing. So with this style of gardening it has been an evolution over a number of years and I have generally been quite buoyed up by the way the plants respond to this quite counterintuitive way of gardening and I'm not saying for one second that it's absolutely immaculate and perfect in every way but what it does do is support a tremendous amount of pollinators so if there are some sacrifices in terms of the microbiology within the soil and I haven't studied that to be honest but the benefit that it gets that wildlife gets and biodiversity gets from the flowers that are created and the habitat that's created I'm quite happy to sleep at night knowing that I've created that coupled with the notion that I'm not wasting water in terms of a resource so when you visit beautiful formal gardens and you look at these big mixed borders where the plants are mulched regularly I would guess that they're probably irrigated regularly as well and to achieve those results the amount of resources required to create that spectacle is something that I haven't been so easy with and started to question so when we start looking at the sand or the concrete or the gravel or what have you to know that we can create these displays without any pop-up irrigation without chucking lots of fertilizer around to me that is the win and a type of gardening that I want to explore in the future and you're not fertilizing and also the leaves aren't breaking down and there's no mulch and so on so how do the plants maintain their nutrition I've had a chat with a number of gardeners about this because there's a huge amount of experimentation that's going on at the moment with this style of gardening the community of plants particularly in the concrete we're into year four or year five now it changes over time so if you can I liken it to a plowed agricultural field the first year you get this wonderful flush of red poppies or fox gloves or what it might be real spectacle fireworks over time that organic matter layer starts to build up and that's when you get the biomass that's sort of the nettles and the the gorse and the birches and all that sort of and then the oak trees start to come in so it's a real evolution there is a degree of organic matter that builds up through root death and although we try to sort of remove as much of the leaf litter as humanly possible there that does add to the organic layer so the organic layer does build up over time which tends to favor different types of plants I think where we've gone with the sand and we've used clump forming perennials that tend to grow and then go back to a clump that's been a more static in terms of the effect with the concrete where we used a lot of seed raised material we've lost some of that delicacy and diversity and what's come through is more of a bulky silphiums for being a big bulky aryngium giganteum so it's evolving and changing and the big question for me and my team is how much we embrace that evolution and that change or whether we try to sort of reset a bit and what we're looking at doing this spring this coming spring is doing a bit of both and let's see how that goes but there definitely is a buildup of organic matter mother nature wants to put some organic matter back in the soil and and it does it does and I think I'm right in saying that if it's a bit tough plants that survive actually they tend to be more compact you won't be you won't have to stake them and often they're pumping out flowers because they think oh my god I've got to I've got to get this done yes whereas sometimes you can over fertilize and over water and get lots of greenery so could that's part of it as well is it that it's tough for the plants but they they plow well afterwards they get and I suspect there's a lot of um your viewers that grow sedums that grow um bearded irises grasses and you can see those plants absorb all of that fertility grow really quickly and then collapse and that's why a lot of people sort of look at the Chelsea chop or try and pinch to try and stop that that overexertion and then collapsing if you're using a an inert mulch like a gravel or a sand or what have you the growth is that much more compact and you don't tend to get that collapse that you get with more organic based mulches so and grasses tend to grow more stoutly and flower better they don't collapse in the middle so there are certain garden plants that people are probably quite frustrated in the way that they behave in a mixed border and one way is to actually mulch those separately as a little pocket within a wider border to stop that that happening does a sand or rubble layer cause problems in clay heavy soils by creating a perched water table that traps moisture just below the surface I haven't noticed that within our sort of high water table down in other parts of the garden and the water table has sort of come up and and flooded the space and then disappeared again and I haven't noticed that sort of trapped travel but in a heavy soil again I can only sort of really sit here in terms of my experiences of what I've seen over the last sort of four or five years if someone has got a heavy clay soil I would desperately encourage them to trial a piece of garden with this technique first and make sure that it suits them and suits their garden but a lot of the comments and people that have spoken to me about their heavy soil have all been quite favourable in terms of that top layer being more of a sanctuary than a hindrance. Is there a minimum depth of sand or rubble needed before drainage genuinely improves? I spoke to the late great Nigel Dunnett about this 10 centimetres and he thought that that was quite adequate enough to be able to deliver this sort of gardening and quite applicable to people on a domestic scale. The likes of net people tend to go a lot and the Horniman go a lot deeper. So basically in the sand garden it's 10 centimetres what is it in the concrete garden? 10. And the same with the chalk? Yes I mean what I have discovered with the chalk is that I'm going for sort of more 10-15 just because once you've established the garden particularly with the concrete I'm not sure that I can keep adding to it as easily. With the sand we found that actually topping up the layer not only looked quite fresh and nice in the spring it also just gently increased the layer to preserve it. So what did it look like in winter? All right actually it was lots of seed heads. The evergreen started to come through so we use the pencil cypress and we've got the eutopia that was existing there and that's kept going quite quite nicely. By no means something that we had to hide over the winter it held its own I would say. And in terms of the cleanup is the main work for sort of cleaning it up is that spring? Yes so we went through when we started to see some fresh growth at the base took all of the old detritus away and that was an opportunity to then go in through and give it a good weeding as well just to make sure that we were getting it as clean as possible in the early part of the season and that's where we decided to use a little bit of leftover sand that we had from the project to top up some of the areas just to freshen it up really. So that in fact was another question is do you have to top it up? I would say I'd look at doing it say every couple of years just because the sand can sort of compact down a bit you get some algae and some moss growing on it and it just didn't quite look as as it could do and I say that from a standpoint where I'm used to mulching borders every spring you know when you put a fresh layer of organic matter down and you look at a border you go that looks nice I'm in control everything's set just perfectly. I wanted to sort of scratch that itch a little bit with this sand as well I wanted to look at it in the spring and feel that it was full of life and freshness and how beneficial that sand layer was for the garden and whether it was just making me feel a bit better because it looked nicer at that time of year I'm not quite sure but I think the sand will start to integrate with the lower soil so it felt the right thing to do and again it's sort of experimentation really. Do bulbs do fine in the sand? Bulbs do really well in the sand the biggest problem I've had with bulbs in the sand are mice so my daffodils do really well my species tulips do really well but the crocus have been a problem and the fact that they're particularly over the winter everything's looking for that food source so the the crocus that I put through the thyme lawn it's absolutely obliterated. Can you plant by seed in sand or gravel gardens or does it have to be a plant that's already been pot grown? You can sow some seeds into the aggregate but it's not necessarily that given in terms of how much germination you'll get if you want to orchestrate a community of plants I would suggest to grow them in modules or even nine centimetres first so you can actually plan it to begin with. Weed and pest management, does the sand or rubble suppress weeds better than say an ordinary mulch of compost or garden manure? I would say it does actually sand certainly you get some annual weeds appearing which are very easy to remove with the concrete because of the style of plants that we have in there and because that area is prone to flooding and it's just generally a bit more of a wild space so that is quite intense in terms of the weeding just to make sure that we don't allow things to get out of hand so Rose Bay Willow Herb for example we're down there making managing that the Orangium the Verbena we're having to do a lot more work there and also that concrete is about four or five years old now so there's a lot more soil that's coming through the flood water which is then increasing the amount of weeds. So how do slugs and snails deal with the sand garden? I haven't seen much in the way of slug damage at all in the sand garden so I don't think it's a surface they're particularly keen to experiment with. Also there's not many hiding spaces for those slugs and we've got a lot of natural predators around so if people do have problems with slugs in their garden look around and see where those daytime refuges are because I had a big discussion with my mother-in-law not long ago about slugs eating her runner beans I said whereabouts are they going during the day? Nowhere there's no way that they could possibly go and then when I spoke to her about it and had a look at it and she had a water butt and we're on two breeze blocks and lo and behold if you looked under that water butt during it was full of slugs and snails they were coming out feasting on the runner beans during the night and then going back there so by moving the water but you took that away which then sort of brought the problem down a bit. This is an interesting one how do you handle the edges in other words you've got your sand border your sand area and then you've got your grass or the rest of the garden how do you manage those edges? So with the where the lawn meets the sand garden we've got a metal edge that we put around around the perimeter so we can then use edging shears to to manage that also you have a fall and a slight camber as you go up into the sand which then allows you that little trench where you can manage the grass which is sand all the way up to the the edge but if you start trimming your edges regularly you're not dealing with flowering grass so it's then not impacting into the garden but I will say that those lawn edges are where the lawn meets the sand that's probably the most intense area of weeds in the whole garden because you've got that seed bank that's trying to trying to invade particularly with the annual meadow grass that flowers and seeds many times through the year so it's pretty desperate to get involved with the sand. Can you combine sand and rubble or do you have to have basically a sand border or separately a rubble border or separately a gravel border? You can kind of use whatever's available to you easily you know if you're used doing a building project at home and you've got a lot of crushed brick or crushed concrete or sand or gravel a combination of all is absolutely fine and because principally it's a low fertility layer that's hopefully going to trap that moisture in and grow plants without the need for fertility so whether it's brick gravel sand what have you absolutely fine. I think where I'm looking at the gardens here where there's been an awful lot of experimentation it's quite scientific experimentation with sort of John Little and all that I'm trying to contribute to this discussion in a garden setting so to take a lot of that excellent work that people like Peter Corn and John Little are doing and saying how can I then put that into the public eye a bit more and can I create a garden and look at sort of repetition and texture and all those kind of garden design principles so I have tried to sort of make it translatable by saying you can use recycled concrete you can use sand you can use chalk and gravel and flint to distinguish to make it more palatable for people but there's no reason why you can't use those inert components to create your layer in all different ways but obviously then there is the aesthetic side of things that need to be considered as well and what you want in your garden but principally all the different aggregates are doing the same thing we're growing the plants in exactly the same way and if someone wants to try just to set aside a few feet just to try this out just take me very briefly through the steps so I would say ideally a nice open sunny site and particularly in a part of the garden where perhaps you struggle to establish a border because it's been so hot and dry maybe remove the sort of top few centimetres just to get rid of the worst of the organic matter or the rich soil that maybe has built up over the years that could be turf as well just take the few centimetres away and use that in another part of the garden somewhere then put your sort of 10 centimetre layer of aggregate down ideally clearing all those perennial weeds first and then spring planting is really the best time to plant in aggregate in my view because you've got a viable young plant that you know is then going to hit the road running and establish through that year whereas if you plant in the autumn and you're then exposed to very sort of wet cold temperatures there might be a degree of rot if that plant hasn't established itself first. Is there any question people ask you a lot back here when people are going around at West Dean? I think there's a sort of general aversion to it to begin with because it is quite an alien looking part of the garden particularly if people are very comfortable and traditional in the way that they look at feeding and mulching and watering plants. I've been gardening for 30 years and I've certainly been very comfortable with that in the early part of my career and it's only a relatively recent thing that I've started to question that sort of growing but once you start to sort of then show them that the plants are growing happily and healthily it's a bit of a dialogue to be honest because I think a lot of people when they look at sand and even people that I've known for a number of years that are knowledgeable gardeners talk about sand and say we're going to have to water that a lot then. So it's that initial reaction so you don't actually have to start to talk to people about I don't think it's that way and this is how we do it and you notice that plants grow really well, they grow more compact, they're very floriferous. It's more of a dialogue really but you've got a hard sell to begin with particularly with the concrete I would say and where we're putting this new flint and chalk layer down. Someone asked us if we were laying a patio and putting a sub-base down so it's a very interesting conversation but I kind of quite like that that we are saying to people we're challenging people a bit and then particularly sort of three four years down the line if those plant communities are surviving and thriving in that just starts to bring people around to perhaps a different way of doing things in a very familiar setting like Westin it's a good conversation to have. If you didn't see the original sand garden video there's loads more information in that and it's coming up now so don't miss that and thank you for watching goodbye