Country Living Magazine February 2010

Words by Paula McWaters. Photographs by Michelle Garrett.

The BOLD and the BEAUTIFUL

At an intriguing nursery in West Sussex, stunning sculptural plants flourish alongside neatly clipped evergreens, each one guaranteed to bring drama to your garden throughout the year

"I f I started this nursery in a fit of pique, it was because I couldn't obtain a willow podocarp (Podocarpus salignus)," Angus White declares. "I came across one growing in the gardens at South Lodge, a hotel near Nuthurst in West Sussex, and was astonished by the sheer wonderfulness of it, but when I went to find one at a garden centre they had never heard of it. It comes from Chile and because of our maritime climate Chilean plants do well here, so I couldn't understand why no one was growing it. I love the texture - it is so soft and luxuriant, and in June and July there's a strong contrast between the new foliage and the old."

That was 20 years ago and Architectural Plants has since established itself as the nursery for gardeners on the hunt for something strikingly different. In his first catalogue, in 1990, Angus lamented that the average British garden, his own included, "was about as fascinating to look at in winter as a wet breeze block". His initial solution was to introduce us all to dramatically spiky and large-leaved structural plants that would thrive in our climate and bring an all-year-round exotic presence to our gardens.

"The trouble is," Angus explains, "you can do exotic gardening well, but you can also do it very, very badly". When I look at poorly tended palms and phormiums in an awful municipal planting somewhere it makes me wince with a feeling of guilty responsibility. You need to use these plants judiciously. It's no good planting a chusan palm (Trachycarpus fortune) by the sea, then watching the leaves get torn to shreds by the wind. "The enemy of these exotic plants is not so much cold, as it is wind."

These days, Angus's focus is increasingly shifting towards evergreen trees that can be clipped and shaped. While the leafy lanes that lead to the Architectural Plants nursery site in Nuthurst are archetypally English, the entrance is marked by pencil-sharp Italian cypress trees. Man has a very strong presence here, in the midst of nature.

"For me, it's all about looks, not whether a plant has flowers that smell nice for one brief week of the year - basing your choice on that seems mad," Angus says. "We look at a plant and see whether there's anything we can do to make it even more interesting." This is 'creative maintenance' - primping and pruning to improve its profile subtly or dramatically. Niwaki, the Japanese approach to training and shaping garden trees to emphasise their character, is much in evidence.

"Some people enjoy the end-of-season dilapidation of the average British garden in winter but to me it just looks terribly sad," Angus continues. "Perennials grow up, get bigger and bigger, then the autumn comes and they collapse - whereas, with these evergreens, you get permanence. I prefer that.

"We are always fiddling around with things and insisting on imposing order on them," Angus admits.Hence the parade-ground ranks of picture-perfect topiarised evergreens that customers find so hard to resist. Currently, the pruning staff, Tom, Rob and Noi, are having a lot of fun creating blobs. "That's what our customers always call them. They are roundish with flattened tops to give a doughnut effect - a very pleasing shape," he adds. Box and yew respond well to this treatment and the team has even got good results on a stand of rampant and unruly dwarf bamboo (Pleioblastus distichus).

Texture and colour should play a big part when choosing a tree. "You need to make a distinction between whether you are going to see it at close quarters or from a distance," Angus explains. Something like the willow podocarp, he believes, is best appreciated at close range, while another of his favourites, the green olive tree (Phillyrea latifolia) is more sculptural - "like an enormous piece of broccoli".

Light is another vital factor. "If possible, site your tree where it will catch the last rays of the sun. On a summer's evening when the sun is low or during the winter, you will see a complete transformation," Angus says. "Early in the day we are all busy, but later on we might have time to look and appreciate our surroundings. It's a more contemplative time."

Choice of evergreen comes down to reliability, too: "We apply 'the avenue test', that is, what we would recommend for a customer who wanted to plant an avenue of matching trees. You don't want anything experimental in that instance - you need 100 per cent reliability." Holm oak (Quercus ilex), Chinese privet (Ligustrum lucidum) and Elaeagnus ebbingei score highly, as do phillyrea and podocarpus."

Another great help is the nursery's traffic-light system, used to guide customers on frost-hardiness. A green label means hardy anywhere in Britain, while amber and red denote increasing levels of vulnerability. In 20 years, Angus has demoted several plants and promoted only one from red to amber - dasylirion, a grassy-looking Mexican specimen: "Younger customers often think that because the climate's changing we can grow all sorts of things we couldn't before, but people of my age take a different, longer view of it. Just because we had a run of mild winters doesn't mean we can completely relax. The harsh 2008/2009 winter caught a lot of people off-guard."

If Angus and his well-trained staff beat a drum about anything it is plant husbandry: they want you and your pristine plant to have a long and happy life together, so you will find yourself well-armed with clear notes on how to look after it. "We've learned an awful lot about plants in 20 years and we want to pass it on," Angus declares.

Angus's Top Five

1. Hebe parviflora var. angustifolia One of the prettiest and most useful plants in the nursery. Happy anywhere, including dry shade.

2. Phillyrea latifolia (green olive tree) A tight, glossy, evergreen Ð very smart, very sculptural, very Japanese.

3. Podocarpus salignus (willow podocarp) Piles of luxuriant evergreen foliage Ð an essential that will reach around 25 feet eventually.

4. Quercus myrsinifolia (bamboo-leafed oak) With this you get abundant, lovely bamboo-like foliage that is especially beautiful when young.

5. Lyonothamnus floribundus subsp. aspleniifolius (Santa Cruz ironwood tree) Totally fabulous, with dramatic, red stringy bark and fern-like evergreen leaves.

Architectural Plants (www.architecturalplants.com), Nuthurst, Horsham, West Sussex (01403 891772) and Lidsey Road Nursery, Woodgate, Chichester, West Sussex (01243 545008).