Interview with
Peter Thompson
Timber Press: While researching your book, you visited 350 gardens. During what time period did this occur and how did you choose the gardens?
Peter: It all dates back to 1991 when I visited Namaqualand in South Africa, and was lucky enough to arrive at the height of the wildflower season. What I saw there opened my eyes to the flowers of the Southern Hemisphere. Since then I have repeatedly visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and other countries in the Southern Hemisphere, getting to know the flowers, meeting gardeners and touring various gardens. I have had to track these down through a variety of methods including personal contacts, lists of gardens in books, and any other sources available.
TP: What are some of the most unusual plants you encountered?
P: The Looking-Glass Garden is full of unusual plants — none more so than the welwitschia, which grows only in one area of desert in Namibia. Each plant can live for hundreds of years, but consists only of a single pair of leaves that grows longer and more tattered with age. Cycads are another extraordinary group of plants with scaly, serpentine trunks, fruits like ungainly fir cones, and foliage that appears to have been cut jaggedly from sheets of metal. Equally bizarre are the halfmans trees from the Richtersveld in South Africa, with tall, spine-encrusted trunks and nodding top-knots of leaves and flowers.
TP: What are some of the plants most likely to succeed in the Northern Hemisphere, that perhaps might have been overlooked by the growers in those regions?
P: Gardeners in a part of the Northern Hemisphere which enjoys a Mediterranean climate probably have scarcely begun to explore the opportunities provided by the plants of the Looking-Glass Garden. For these gardeners, the flowers that grow wild in parts of South Africa, Australia, and Chile are like treasure-filled chests waiting to be opened. To point out just a few would be to create a false impression by ignoring so many others. Gardeners in cooler, more temperate parts of the world do not have quite so much variety, but they too could enliven their gardens with myrtles, fire bushes, and eucryphias from southern Chile; crimson ratas, celmisias, and silver-filigreed astelias from New Zealand; pink, white, and green as well as scarlet bottle brushes, grevilleas, and wattles from Australia; pineapple flowers, nerines, summer hyacinths, and arum lilies from South Africa.
TP: What are some plants that are very adaptable to a range of environments?
P: Some of the best known would be the annuals and bulbs from South Africa, such as nemesias and gladioli, which are already well established in our gardens. There are also numerous evergreen trees from Australia, New Zealand, and Chile. For example, myrtles, honey myrtles, tea trees, embothriums, bottle brushes, gums wattles, and eucryphias make adaptable, colorful, and amenable garden plants in a wide range of conditions. Those who enjoy growing perennials can indulge themselves with red hot pokers and diascias from South Africa, gunneras, geums, and anemones from Chile, acaenas, sedges, and phormiums from New Zealand, dianellas, violets, and kangaroo paws from Australia, among many others.
TP: You mention that western plant material traditionally dominates gardens in the Southern Hemisphere. Is there a new trend towards using natives? If so, what is contributing to the change?
P: Like gardens throughout the temperate world, the gardens of the Southern Hemisphere are dominated by western European plants and styles of gardening. A very significant minority, including almost all of the gardens I visited while preparing to write The Looking-Glass Garden, are now experimenting with different plants grown in different ways to create new and exciting kinds of gardens. This is a breath of fresh air, blowing through gardens worldwide. New opportunities are coming to the fore, and the beauties and attractions of plants that have not been much valued previously are receiving the recognition they deserve. I also believe that it is part of a trend towards establishing national or regional identity in many countries, through which the importance of indigenous things — people, art, culture, plants — is being recognized as one of the surest ways to establish the distinctive qualities that confer individuality.
