Garden wall art and dumbfounding dahlias

Steffie Shields recommends a visit to Springfields Festival Gardens.

September heralds ‘back to school’ time. Parents are anxious to sort their growing offspring’s uniforms, shoes and new PE kit. Somewhat nervy sons and daughters are anticipating new challenges and new teachers, and happily catching up with their friends. Grandparents reminisce about the highs and lows of their own schooldays.

Make the most of these warm, late summer days in your own garden and, as peace descends with the children occupied at school, your freedom. For those fortunate to love learning or those who simply love being out of doors, gardening proves a perfect exercise and constantly changing art.

Perpetual students find huge advantage and mental stimulation with new plants to discover and nurturing techniques to learn. Take time off from chores to head to a park or open garden. Notice subtle differences that time and weather make to our local world of flowers and trees.

Family venue
Last year in mid-September, I joined Lincolnshire Gardens Trust members on a late summer visit to Springfields Festival Gardens in Spalding, a marvellous family venue combining shopping therapy and fresh air walks in the park. Besides observing planting and design ideas, we were able to photograph rich early autumn colours.

We all love to hear stories about the origins and making of gardens. Having managed the Festival Gardens with dedication for over 20 years, head gardener Andy Boynton proved a fascinating, expert tour guide, sharing memories and highlights of his rewarding horticultural career.

Andy chose his spot to welcome the assembled group, purposefully standing near to a rather strange large shrub. He indicated and described with pride one of his most tender plants, a dahlia tree, Dahlia imperialis, or giant dahlia.

Apparently, all common ornamental dahlia cultivars originate from this wild species native to Mexico and Central America. Hard to believe, in a few warmer months this clump-forming, deciduous perennial can grow from its tuber up to four metres high, its foliage adding rewarding tropical texture to the gardens.

I was dumbfounded, having never come across such a specimen. It seemed somewhat incongruous in a setting famed for its spring bulbs!

Sadly, Andy’s dahlia tree was still not in flower, but he remained hopeful. Come late October, single, pretty, pink-purple flowers might just burst into showy bloom before any frosts arrive.

Gardening roots
With charming passion for the Springfields Dahlia Collection, Andy explained all dahlias are members of the Aster family, and named after Anders Dahl (1751-1789) an 18th-century Swedish botanist.

His gardening team spend five weeks, from May into June, uplifting over 130,000 spring bulbs. These are directly replaced with over 1,200 dahlia tubers, including over 100 varieties. (Visit www.springfieldsfestivalgardens.org.uk for Festival Gardens Dahlia Collection Classifications listed, 2022.)

We all marvelled at Andy’s vibrant late summer/early autumn displays, carefully staked with canes in numerous borders. They included some amazing colour combinations, for instance Dahlia ‘Take Off’, an unusual anemone type with large lavender and creamy yellow blooms. A well-named cactus variety, Dahlia ‘White Star’, flowers “its elegant ivory socks off” till the first frost.

From the early 1900s, the South Holland district’s main crop was simply daffodils, until 1907 when Sam Culpin planted the first large plot of tulips. After World War II, as the wholesale bulb industry grew, in 1948 the thriving Bulb Growers’ Association organised Tulip Week. Eleven years later, they incorporated the popular Spalding Flower Parade, before setting their sights even higher to showcase horticultural prowess and to celebrate the bulb industry.

In October 1964, work began to transform 20 acres of ploughed farmland, in a low-lying flood plain. After 18 months’ hard graft, hampered by bad weather and waterlogged soil, a lake was created with landscaped walkways, with a million bulbs and 30,000 trees planted. Opening in April 1966, Springfields Gardens attracted over 400,000 visitors, and displayed 3,000 varieties of spring-flowering bulbs, and over 300 types of tulips in glasshouses.

From 1967 to 1990, a new charity was founded, dedicated to the growth of horticulture and floral design in the Spalding region. Springfields Horticultural Society helped the ongoing management of the gardens.
However, to address the problem of cyclical restoration and decline, a range of partners invested more than £30m to enable a complete reinvention of the site.

Festival Gardens
In May 2004, Springfields Outlet Shopping & Leisure and Festival Gardens opened in conjunction with Springfields Horticultural Society.

Celebrated garden designers brought their own inspirations and character to a varied series of Chelsea-style showcase gardens. These have somehow stood the test of time, lending a feel of garden design history, as fashions inevitably change.

Charlie Dimmock’s ‘Jungle Island’, Chris Beardshaw’s ‘Sculpture Matrix’, Kim Wilde’s ‘A Lifetime Ahead’ and Steven Woodhams’ ‘Find Your Own Desire Line’, and the strikingly different, Sansui Design’s Momotaro Garden based on a Japanese folk tale.

In addition, a collection of Stephen Newby spectacular “blown” stainless steel sculptures is largely based around a water theme, featuring a water pyramid fountain, pillow planters and a specially commissioned 15ft ‘Kaleidoscope Wheel’ in the canal.

Formal gardens include The Senses Garden, The Sun Dial Garden and The Founders Garden, as well as areas of natural woodland and wetlands. The Memorial Garden with its rose-covered obelisks was dedicated in 1986 to the Royal British Legion.

Close by, HRH Princess Anne showed her approving support by adding another layer of history, planting the Queen Mother’s Tree, a tulip tree, Liriodendron tulipifera.

After some 60 years, this is an amazing arboretum with many unusual mature specimen trees. Look out for the striking, large, lime-green, ovate-leaved Paulownia tomentosa, a fabulous contrast to one of the best Japanese maples, Acer palmatum ‘Senkaki’, the coral-bark maple turning fiery yellow-orange and red.

For my sins, I had never previously visited these Festival Gardens in September, nor allowed myself enough time to explore their full extent.

It was a privilege and an education to be taken round by someone whose horticultural knowledge is second to none. So I recommend gardening club events organisers to pre-book a garden tour with Andy Boynton. Despite the name, here are memorable all-year round gardens, a veritable outdoor art exhibition with some of Chelsea’s best design ideas.

There have been hanging gardens since Babylon. Now one can buy a set of vertical gardening modules, ideal for smaller town gardens and adaptable to suit any size of wall or fence, often coming with an in-built irrigation system. Hence my personal best in show was Chris Beardshaw’s wall art. A living painting featured as if by magic on a smart creamy-yellow wall amongst pencil cypresses, thanks to what Andy called “the Rolls Royce of vertical planters.” Mixed ferns, grasses and heucheras all blend to make a fascinating, textured green and mauve tapestry in the Indian summer sunshine.

Go see if it’s still there!

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