Driving out of London to visit John Little at his home in south Essex, the busy road is flanked by tower blocks, which gradually give way to a post-industrial landscape of car manufacturing plants, storage depots and docks. Only in the later stages of the journey does the landscape begin to assert itself in a flat expanse of marshland, wide skies and wheeling birds.
This is where John grew up and in many ways the place has shaped the man that he is today. “As a kid I used to play in the disused chalk and sand pits. I have always loved that mixture of natural and man-made, and we have a lot of it around here,” he says.
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He also grew up gardening enthusiastically alongside his parents and grandparents, but whereas they strove for old-school order, young John preferred chucking a handful of seeds around to see what happened. “I did care what it looked like. I just came at it from a different direction.”
In brief: a garden in south Essex
- What Private experimental garden.
- Where Essex.
- Size Four acres.
- Soil Heavy clay, manipulated with the addition of considerable quantities of a variety of aggregates.
- Climate Temperate.
- Hardiness zone USDA 9.
Today he is still coming at gardening (and, you suspect, life in general) from a different direction and, in the process, his home has become a Mecca for a new breed of horticultural ecologists who place equal emphasis on biodiversity and aesthetics.
I wanted to make a garden focused on wildflowers and wildlife. I wanted to make a home with a green roof, and I wanted to experiment
It is a fashionable ethos right now but, when he moved to Hilldrop 30-odd years ago, neither he nor anyone else really knew what he was doing. “I wanted to make a garden focused on wildflowers and wildlife. I wanted to make a home with a green roof. And I wanted to experiment.”
His trial ground was a four-acre plot on a south-facing slope, with heavy clay soil and a mature shelter belt that protected the garden from the prevailing winds. It was rich land, ripe for traditional garden making, but John had a different vision. Inspired by Canvey Wick, a local brownfield site, which was declared the most biodiverse place in the whole country just 50 years after it was abandoned, he set out to explore the creative possibilities of recycled waste materials.
If you neatly pile mounds of crushed brick in a well-positioned gabion, most people will find it as attractive as the invertebrates do
“I wanted to play around with native coloniser plants and growing in aggregates. But trashing good topsoil never makes sense, so I got the digger out and moved a lot of it over to the side where my wife Fiona has her productive garden. Then I brought in several tonnes of local sand, which had been excavated during a road-widening project. That was the start of it. We went from 60 to 120 different bee species within four years.
If you bring in a range of substrates and increase the range of conditions you can offer, whether that’s a mound of leftover sand or a pile of rubble, wonderful things soon start to happen. And it doesn’t have to look like a builder’s yard. If you neatly pile those mounds of crushed brick or whatever in a steel-edged circular bed or a well-positioned gabion, most people will find it as attractive as the invertebrates do.”
Having laid out his structurally complicated canvas, John began to embroider it with plants, direct sowing seed mixes of predominantly native plants. “It produces a completely random distribution of species, but then you put the design in by hand weeding.”
In summer, the garden is awash with ox-eye daisies and scabious, splashed with scarlet poppies and punctuated with a mad assortment of steam-punk style habitat structures. In among it all, there are some more overtly ornamental plants.
I have become obsessed. Mini habitat piles, habitat panels, bee posts, dead hedges, wet and dry standing wood, hanging dead wood – I am always trying new things
John admits to a fondness for salvias, verbenas, woad and tree lupins. “But verbascums and thistles are my big thing. Who wouldn’t like a woolly thistle? It’s got these amazing 3D leaves with a real fleecy texture, and wool carder bees come and pull out the fluff.”
Increasingly, his focus is on habitats first, plants second. “I have become obsessed – mini habitat piles, habitat panels, bee posts, dead hedges, wet and dry standing wood, hanging dead wood – I am always trying new things.
Let’s value the stuff that would otherwise go to landfill, and value the skills of the gardeners and craftspeople who can turn it into something beautiful
“We just got in an incredibly skilled bloke – Duncan Nuttall – to make a rubble dry stone wall for us, and it is absolutely beautiful,” says John. “Employing him cost five times what I spent on the materials, but that is the sort of mental shift we all need to start making. Let’s value the stuff that would otherwise go to landfill, and value the skills of the gardeners and craftspeople who can turn it into something beautiful.
Useful information
We’ll return to John’s garden Hilldrop in December for another feature on winter structure. Find out more about his work at grassroofcompany.co.uk