Clay

We are quite used to customers announcing in tones of great gloom that their garden is ‘clay’ and we absolutely understand because most of us also garden on clay soils. It’s a soil of extremes – too wet and sticky in the winter, too dry and hard in the summer. But it is also rich and fertile and with a bit of work, and the right choice of plants, produces fantastic gardens.

Consider for example, beautiful Sissinghurst in Kent which is built on Wealden clay. RHS Rosemoor in Devon is also on clay which is made particularly sticky by the high rainfall, while the gardeners at RHS Hyde Hall in Essex are gardening on clay as well, but because of the low rainfall they are tackling a completely different range of difficulties. And the Eden Project was built in a disused clay pit…..

As with all the other soils, part of the solution is lots and lots of organic matter. When I was a child, we were told to ‘double dig’ which was a great deal of labour, but luckily, current wisdom is that this does as much harm as good in damaging the structure of the soil and that it is much more efficient to harness the army of worms to do the job for us. If you want an illustration of just how effective these worms are, then look at a bed covered in autumn leaves and see how those leaves vanish over the winter, pulled down by the worms deeply into the clay, improving not only the fertility but also the drainage capacity of the soil.