Sussex Prairies Garden, West Sussex.

In a day of mid-August, low grey sky and cool air gave unexpected intensity to the flower borders at Sussex Prairies Garden. After crossing the small bridge at the end of the wood, where a couple of pigs of a rare local breed wallowed happily in the mud, I stopped in front of thousands of flowers and grasses, uncertain which way to go.

Created in 2008 by Pauline and Paul McBride, experienced horticulturists and gardeners, the six-acre garden is designed as a sequence of semicircular beds divided into huge blocks of vigorous perennials and grasses framed by the lawn.

A series of rectangular beds run along the central avenue, flanked on both sides by a row of undulated hornbeam hedges, punctuated by groups of fastigiate trees lined up to three, hornbeams of course.

I discovered the combinations of heights, shapes, textures and colors walking along the borders and crossing them, following the smaller paths that snake through the plants. The two small mounds at the end of the property were a good vantage point to see the garden beyond the clumps of grasses and drifts of flowers: the cutting flower garden, on the left, just after the bridge, farm buildings, the busy tea room and the plant sale area in the center, while the pond and the bee hives were on the right. Actually, most of them were completely hidden by vegetation and just roofs were clearly visible.

The prodigious clay soil, dutifully improved, perfectly suits these herbaceous perennials and grasses that reach their full development in a couple of years. There is no room for weeds among the thick groups of monarda, echinacea, helenium and veronicastrum. There is no room for tiny flowers either, little things would get lost among towering sanguisorba and rudbeckia.
At the end of the winter, a controlled bonfire eliminates the remains of the vegetation in the borders, mulch is applied and, between February and June, plants are patiently divided to be sold in the nursery or used in the gardens that the couple creates around the globe. New plants are experimented every year. Inspiration comes from visits to other people's gardens or to flower shows, exchanges with other gardens and friends or suggestions from passionate customers and visitors.

The massive use of perennials and grasses was inspired by their work with Piet Oudolf, the renowned Dutch plantsman and garden designer whose ideas are shaping the contemporary naturalistic-garden.

A herd of bisons peacefully grazes in this English prairie recalling the inhabitants that, long time ago, populated the flat and seemingly endless landscape made of grasses, perennials and low shrubs evoked by this garden: the American prairie. 
At Sussex Prairies, the bisons are steel shapes, the horizontal line is soon broken by the surrounding agricultural landscape and the flowers are not native species but cultivars. But perhaps, even Jens Jensen, the Danish immigrant that, at the beginning of the twentieth century, created the first gardens in the prairies style in Chicago, would understand our desire to recreate the beauty and energy of those expanses of wild flowers.

Photos:

TravelinaGarden, Sussex Prairies, August 2015.

Links:

Sussex Prairies Garden,
http://www.sussexprairies.co.uk