Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
At this year’s inaugural Chatsworth Flower Show (put on by the Royal Horticultural Society), designer Jo Thompson’s garden stood up well to the rotten weather.
Opening day: Despite small, unintentional lakes around her garden, Thompson’s exquisite planting is spared flooding, and resists winds of 40 miles per hour.
Jo Thompson’s garden for Brewin Dolphin at the first RHS Chatsworth Show.
Plus, Chatsworth as a subject already has form on the show garden circuit: two years ago Dan Pearson made a garden at the Chelsea Flower Show which was a direct response to Paxton’s Rockery at Chatsworth, with giant boulders transported down from Derbyshire.
Chatsworth House, during the show.
Smart hedgerow plants: Geranium ‘Orion’, dusky pink Campanula takesimana ‘Elizabeth’, and the maroon thistle Cirsium ‘Trevors Blue Wonder’. This is the biggest garden that veteran Chelsea sponsor Brewin Dolphin has ever built, but it is a mere speck amid the grandeur of the Peak District.
A colony of Campanula takesimana ‘Elizabeth’, which is planted elsewhere with the dark purple variety, C. ‘Sarastro’.
Back to Jo, and her peculiar form of masochism: “I weirdly like the awful feeling of standing on a bare piece of ground on day one, wondering how on earth we are going to achieve what I’ve set out to achieve,” she ponders.
Opium poppies, dahlias, peonies, white Orlaya grandifolia, and recurring pale yellow sulphur clover (Trifolium ochroleucon). Some areas have neat and ordered planting (above) whereas others reflect the wilder landscape, with middle story wildflowers growing out of a low story wildflower turf.
Black stalks against green foliage: dahlia and salvia mingle with the dark branching stems of Astrantia ‘Burgundy Manor’ and the taller stems of permanently fashionable and shockingly pink Dianthus carthusianorum.
Elegance segues into something more pastoral, with paths mowed through daisies.
Tall, wavy (yet wind-resistant) Valeriana officinalis is a handsome self-seeder and pops up here at intervals, which it would certainly do in a “real” garden.
Rusted steel rods make an unlikely but very effective pairing with the informal planting. Derbyshire is a fabulous landscape, where the Midlands of England rise into rocky peaks, with moors, miles of stone walls, huge houses and former mining villages.