The Victorians enjoyed staging a tropical summer, and some of their swashbuckling bedding schemes of bold foliage and brilliant colour are still recreated annually in our public parks and seaside resorts. Recently, encouraged by warmer winters, and inspired by looser modern blueprints for jungly planting in gardens such as Great Dixter in Sussex, British gardeners have also been alerted once more to the potential of exotics such as cannas, dahlias, tree ferns and salvias.
So far, though, I have not seen a 'hot plant/cool climate’ garden, as Dennis Schrader describes it, anywhere near comparable in gusto to that of his and Bill Smith’s three-acre plot in Mattituck on the eastern seaboard of the United States. The north fork of Long Island is just far enough from New York to have remained peppered with farms, and Schrader and Smith bought theirs, a pale clapboard house adjoining flat arable land, in 1992. Their garden does not jar with this setting, for from the deck, the broad expanse of lawn melts into sweeps of meadow-like planting, featuring soft violet and purple shades of hardy salvia and spiky acanthus, pastel achilleas, pale-pink roses, and bands of stipa, carex and miscanthus grasses. But within the garden’s bounds, the mood is, as Schrader puts it, 'less inhibited’.
It was in the late 1980s that the pair started getting deeply into exotics. Both had studied garden design in New York, and had already set up a design and build landscaping business. 'We were doing lots of New York rooftop gardens, and using exotics as summer annuals,’ Schrader told me. 'I had always grown tons of them as houseplants, but the more Bill and I saw of them on our winter trips to the Caribbean the more interested we got. The problem was that the range available up here was pretty limited, so we started raising our own, importing stuff from Florida, and getting seed from all over the world.’
In an 'epiphany’ moment, he explained, they realised that they enjoyed the growing more than the designing. So they started up a wholesale nursery, Landcraft Environments, which is now one of the biggest specialist suppliers of exotics in the region, distributing about a million plants a year in a mouthwatering 1,000 varieties.
Growing exotics in a part of the country with very cold winters sounds perverse. But summers here are long, with temperatures hovering for many weeks in the high 80s coupled with 50 to 70 per cent humidity. Giant orange pumpkins are a prominent field crop, and Long Island even gets the tail end of tropical storms whipping up the coast from Florida, as I experienced on my first visit to Mattituck in the autumn of 1999 for Gardeners’ World. Confined indoors by official curfew, we watched out of the window as the banana leaves we had intended to film were shredded by the wind. There is an exoticism to the wildlife, too, with hummingbirds, large praying mantis and orange monarch butterflies common garden visitors.
So tropical plants are very much at home here. 'In fact, they often do better in East Coast gardens than traditional English-style herbaceous plants,’ Smith commented. With two and a half acres of nursery glasshouse adjoining the garden, he and Schrader can draw on a huge array of specimen plants for their tropical summer makeover. 'And we don’t have to pay for them, either!’ They bring them outside from late May onwards, gradually hardening them off. 'We like the night temperatures to be in the upper 50s, otherwise their growing will be set back, and the operation takes us right through June, because we do whole beds of annuals as well as pots.’
Some of the exotic interventions are restrained. In the generous double borders leading up to their tiki (slang for Balinese) hut, with its wooden shingle roof and luxuriously inviting seating, the repetitions of grasses, purple verbenas, 'Heritage’ roses and blue mophead hydrangeas set a gentle rhythm. Just here and there, to provide some counterpoint, there are small eruptions of broad, purple-leafed cannas and pineapple-flowered eucomis, and in pots in front of the tiki hut, a pair of cream-variegated furcraea, yucca-like but without the sharp needle tips.
The scene, though, is not as mellow as it seems, for there is an exotic fuse gently burning through the summer. The grasses along the path edge are Japanese blood grass, Imperata cylindrica 'Rubra’, and in autumn their blades turn a sweltering red. Inside the hut, the rafters hang with orchids and stag’s horn fern.
Nearer the main house, things hot up further. A pond is bedded out in aquatics such as violet-blue water hyacinth, papyrus and tropical blue waterlilies. Neighbouring beds flaunt the sail-like foliage of bananas, such as red-leafed Ensete ventricosum 'Maurelii’, together with the elephantine shields of Alocasia macrorrhiza, Xanthosoma sagittifolium 'Chartreuse Giant’, and the sooty Colocasia esculenta 'Jet Black Wonder’. Outsize foliage is a major element of exotic gardening (and is featured in a book, Extraordinary Leaves, by Schrader, published by Firefly last autumn), and he and Smith are always on the lookout for exciting new forms. One of the most amazing is the variegated banana, whose cream and grey-green patterning penetrates right through to the sweet-tasting fruits – once allowed to be eaten only by Hawaiian royalty.
Such plants are carefully grouped and designed into the composition. 'Tropical gardening breaks many of the good-taste gardening rules, but we like to pick out a colour theme in each area and create proper accents,’ Schrader explained. Silver leaves, such as silky-textured plectranthus, are often associated not with the traditional whites, pinks and blues of English gardening, but rich red, orange and gold flowers for bolder impact, while to avoid a jarring picture, variegated foliage tends to be partnered with plants of solid colour that echo one of the tints in the variegation.
I have never seen nettle-leafed coleus used better than here (their catalogue lists more than 60 named forms) – pools of the plum-back variety 'Purple Emperor’ teamed up with the shimmering white caterpillar heads of the grass Pennisetum villosum, and seams of terracotta-orange 'Sedona’ bedded out through catmint. These are Smith’s schemes. 'Dennis and I tend to trade off different areas of the garden and plant them independently rather than together. Our ideas don’t always tally. But if we are allowed our own vision, we can surprise each other with unexpected insights and colour combinations.’
Gargantuan blossoms, like those of proteas and brugmansias, dripping in huge night-scented trumpets, feature around the house deck, which becomes a tropical pot extravaganza in summer. Rather than putting different plants together in big containers, they prefer to give each specimen its own pot, and then arrange them for impact. Leea amabilis 'Splendens’, with large burgundy- red leaves, is a favourite here – it makes a good houseplant for a sunny windowsill in winter.
To reduce the amount of watering required, Schrader advises mixing moisture-retentive gel with the compost, and to cut down evaporation, lining the inside of their terracotta pots with plastic bin liners, punctured for drainage. He imparts such advice as a regular guest on Martha Stewart’s television channel – indeed, when I last spoke to him, she had just telephoned to ask if she could pop in to see the garden on her way to the city.
Some of the plants fuelling the exotic mood in their garden are, in fact, hardy. Giant hostas such as 'Sum and Substance’ luxuriate under the trees, and the large spreading shrub of Tetrapanax papyrifer, the rice paper plant, has come through numerous winters without protection – its branches are killed, but it re-sprouts from underground. Japanese banana (Musa basjoo) also survives under a mulch. Both are also fairly reliable in the warmer counties of Britain.
Some of our hardy garden plants, such as gunnera, are not tough enough for the Long Island winter, and others like Chusan palm (Trachycarpus) can only make it if well wrapped. On the other hand, the extra heat of the East Coast summer ripens the wood of plants like large-flowered hibiscus, H moscheutos, enabling them to survive winters there but not in Britain.
Exotic gardening pursued with this sort of informal artistry is still uncommon in the region. 'We had a group of nearly 300 people around the garden yesterday, and you could see they were taken aback,’ Smith commented. 'It was like nothing they had ever seen before, and it was nice to hear them rave about it. For me, the excitement is in the boldness of the foliage and the textures.’
For Schrader, 'going through the different rooms of the garden is like going on a mini-vacation. For visitors, it is a bit like falling through Alice’s rabbit hole, and finding themselves in another world.’