In Conversation With: Jonny Bruce
It is going to be a hot day. Jonny Bruce watered everything at The Field Nursery the evening before, and it will all need another round before long. It seems the natural place to begin: with water, and with what we owe the plants we grow.
“You can give plants too much of anything,” Jonny says. “Too much fertiliser, too much water.” In his experience, plants are quite good at telling you when they need a drink. The harder question is what to grow in the first place, as our summers become hotter and drier. Leaning towards plants adapted to less rainfall is sensible, he agrees, and plenty of Mediterranean species will earn their place. But he is wary of treating that as the whole answer. “I don’t think it’s good enough, if we’re trying to promote a more sustainable type of horticulture, just to recommend that people stop growing the plants that they love.” Climate change is man-made, he points out, and so it is something we still have the capacity to resist; he would rather hold on to our native oaks “than just watch them frazzle up in a forty-degree summer.” Nor is he sentimental about it. He returns to Beth Chatto’s “right plant, right place,” and has little time for automated irrigation that keeps unsuitable plants on life support. Being realistic matters. Being too accepting of the future we are heading towards, he suggests, would be a failing of its own.
Most of what Jonny grows are hardy perennials: not purely native plants, but plants adapted to British winters. There is always room, though, for a few special things under cover, among them a clivia in a creamy butter yellow rather than the usual reddish orange, from Derry Watkins, a good friend of Jonny’s and, as it happens, a near neighbour of ours; our old workshop was barely a mile from her. “I could talk to Derry for days about plants.”
Outside is a tree dahlia with a story attached. As a student at Great Dixter, Jonny got to know Steve and Lou of the No Name Nursery in Kent, both obsessed with dahlias, and remembers talking with Steve about how wonderful a black-leaved tree dahlia would be. There wasn’t one. Years later, at the Dixter Plant Fair, Steve said: “I think I’ve got something that you would like.” It is their own selection of Dahlia imperialis, as far as Jonny knows the first of its kind, and while the leaves green with age, the new foliage emerges “beautifully inky”. It comes from Mexico, can reach up to three metres, and tends to flower in October, which in our climate means a race against the first frosts.
Nearby is Dahlia merckii, grown from seed and selected by Jonny for its icy lavender colour; naturalistic, open-faced, and a world away from the stiff doubles bred for flower power and cutting. “I love all dahlias,” he says, but in many doubles the nectaries and stamens have mutated into petals, and the flower has become so difficult for a bee to get into “that essentially it’s only there for look.” Almost everything at the nursery is genuinely good for pollinators.
He is careful not to let this become a simple matter of native versus non-native. Many non-native plants have real ecological value; others can act as ecological traps, recognised by a native moth as a place to lay its eggs, only for the caterpillars to survive rather than thrive. “I think there’s a really important distinction between surviving and thriving.” He mentions Josh Sparks, who farms in Devon on East Asian natural farming principles, and who told Jonny that he farms for beetles, with the crops as a pleasant byproduct. “In a way, I’d like to garden in a similar way. We choose plants and we create habitats for the insects, and the flowers are a nice byproduct.” None of this, he insists, need be a compromise. Diversity is at the heart of it. A lawn and a few Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ may suit a minimalist taste, but to Jonny it is “rather depressing”, a garden with almost no potential to support. life. He leans towards the maximalist, as he learnt at Great Dixter, a garden “absolutely fizzing with life”. And beauty has its own purpose: “Humans need to nourish themselves with beauty and joy as much as they do with food.”
It is why the nursery holds both the familiar and the strange. Jonny hears it often: “Oh, I kill everything I touch.” More often than not, he says, the fault lies with plants bought from supermarkets, raised under cover on a diet of chemical sprays and then set down in the harsh reality of a real garden. So The Field Nursery offers the geraniums and hostas people remember from their mother’s or grandmother’s garden, strong and well grown. But there is no mail order, and that is deliberate. Visitors must come in person, and on the way they pass through the stock beds and past incidental pots, and ask: what’s that? A Melanthium virginicum, perhaps, a Veratrum relative from the wet prairies of North America. Rarely seen in this country, and exactly the point. His species pelargoniums tell the same story; the closer to the species, the better, “ninety-nine per cent of the time.” One he has had since 2014, Pelargonium caffrum, which was gifted to him by nurseryman Dino Pelizzaro when he was a student at Great Dixter. “It’s come with me everywhere I’ve gone.”
That European outlook matters to him. Years ago, when a newspaper column called for a “horticultural Brexit”, Jonny answered it in the FT: the most interesting experiments in growing, he argued, were happening on the continent, in the south of France and in Sweden. Chief among the growers he had in mind was Peter Korn, the Swedish plantsman who grows in sand. I first heard Peter speak at one of the talks Derry
Watkins hosts at the University of Bath, and spent the whole evening astonished. In front of Jonny’s polytunnel, what look like piles of sand are trial beds directly inspired by him: twenty-odd centimetres of pure sand. “It’s the roots you grow,” Jonny says, quoting the introduction to Peter’s book. With few nutrients and little water to hand, plants are forced to send down a far more extensive root network; it is the same reason we are told to water once deeply rather than little and often. Plants grown this way become physically tougher, with a leatheriness that aphids and other biting insects, so often the carriers of disease, struggle to penetrate.
Beyond them are the stock beds, the source of the cuttings, divisions and seed from which the nursery grows the vast majority of what it sells. Nothing here is designed, and the combinations happen by chance. A Baptisia, a North American legume, sends down deep tap roots and fixes its own nitrogen, forming mounds of grey-green foliage that are “bone hardy” once established, a perennial you can keep for decades rather than the year or two many supermarket perennials manage. Astragalus galegiformis, a goat’s rue from the Caucasus, has flowers of icy lemon yellow. “I’m such a sucker for an icy lemon yellow,” Jonny says. In the garden he recently helped plant for Tom Stuart-Smith at Badminton, a few pale yellows, Scabiosa ochroleuca, Silphium mohrii and Achillea ‘Credo’, lift a scheme full of purple and stop it feeling maudlin. “Yellow is such a joyous and uplifting colour, but as soon as you present it to a client on a planting plan, they’re like, ‘Oh no, yellow.’”
A clump of Agapanthus ‘Sophie’ is flowering freely in open ground, which runs against my own belief that agapanthus need their roots constrained in a pot. Not the hardy ones, Jonny says. “No plant prefers to be in a pot. All plants prefer to be in the ground.” He likes that it is compact without being dumpy, unlike the many plants now bred short, as he puts it, for the convenience of the supermarket trolley.
His taste runs to the subtle, Sida hermaphrodita with its mass of foliage and tiny white flowers, and to the odd, though never for its own sake. “As long as it’s got an ecological function,” he says, oddity is welcome; plants grown purely for their strangeness are “a bit of a dead end”. Butterflies are moving over the stock beds as he speaks, and the air is loud with insects. “I just love hearing the sounds of the insects,” he says. “It’s an indication we’re doing something right.”
Jonny Bruce is the owner of The Field Nursery, a small independent nursery just outside Cirencester in Gloucestershire, open Wednesday to Saturday by appointment.