When a project is spearheaded by someone as horticulturally well-connected (and as discerning) as Jonny Bruce, it is always going to attract a lot of interest. This month, he is opening The Field Nursery, near Cirencester, to showcase an eclectic, highly desirable range of organically grown plants. Having worked as a gardener for many years – first as a student as the Christopher Lloyd Scholar at Great Dixter in East Sussex, then at the De Hessenhof nursery in the Netherlands and most recently for the likes of Dan Pearson and Arne Maynard – Jonny has his finger on the pulse when it comes to plants. His expertise is combined with artistic flair (he studied art history at Cambridge). This is evident in everything from the cluster of attractive buildings on-site to the way he combines plants, both in the field and in a vase.
It was the crossover between art and horticulture that led him initially into the gardening world. ‘I was looking for ways to dovetail my degree with my interest in horticulture,’ he says. ‘I’d set up a student allotment at Girton College. That act of garden-making was the trigger to everything else, combining my creativity with a love of nature and the desire to lead a more sustainable life.’ While he was at university, his mother gave him a copy of Derek Jarman’s book Modern Nature, introducing him to Derek’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Kent, which became the subject of his undergraduate thesis. He started volunteering at Prospect while working at Great Dixter and took over the guardianship of it when Keith Collins, Derek’s former partner, died suddenly in 2018.
From 2016 to 2020, Jonny worked at the pioneering nursery De Hessenhof, an experience that has shaped his approach to The Field Nursery. ‘It was wonderful to go to Hessenhof and find Hans and Miranda [Kramer] growing plants in a sustainable way and doing it profitably,’ he says. Offering more than 3,000 different plant varieties, mostly propagated in-house, the nursery integrates a series of mother beds containing plants used for propagation. ‘The stock beds were like a huge living plant catalogue. In such a dynamic system, we couldn’t plan the layout, so you’d get chance combinations, which could often be a spark for designing borders.’
Inspired by this model, The Field Nursery has stock beds and more designed areas to show how plants can be grouped together. ‘What I loved about Hessenhof is that you always had the feeling of being within a garden,’ says Jonny. ‘The garden’s evolved from the nursery rather than the other way round.’ As well as providing visual inspiration, the stock beds are a source of propagation material. ‘Our aim is to propagate almost all the plants ourselves. We need to resist the impulse to grow things too quickly under glass with excessive fertiliser. If you put a tablespoon of fertiliser into every two-litre pot you’re selling, you get a plant with lots of foliage and flowers, but the root system won’t be strong. I think people are starting to understand this isn’t a viable future for how we grow plants.’
Alongside organic, slow-grown potted plants, The Field Nursery will offer bare-root perennials. This is a return to traditional nursery practice, in which plants are lifted to order from the ground – reducing the need for plastic pots. With a focus on hardy herbaceous perennials, the plant list will include garden stalwarts as well as rarer varieties. Many of these fit into the meadowy, naturalistic aesthetic now fashionable – from umbellifers like the lacy white Athamanta turbith subsp. haynaldii, and Heptaptera triquetra, with acid-yellow flowers held on wiry stems, to silvery-leafed Klasea bulgarica.
Jonny’s network of eminent plantspeople gives him the perfect platform to seek out new varieties of traditional plants: a fresh form of Persicaria amplexicaulis called ‘Bloody Mary’ from Coen Jansen, for instance; and an unusual hybrid of Symphyotrichum turbinellum from Mary Keen. ‘It’s dangerous to get stuck in a palette of plants that is familiar and safe. We’d like to encourage people to experiment and boost the biodiversity of their gardens,’ says Jonny. With his right-hand man Daniel Carlson (another Great Dixter alumnus), he will add to the list of plants as time goes on, no doubt introducing interesting Field Nursery selections from seed-grown stock.
Jonny and Daniel plan to run courses at the nursery with the aim of inspiring people to grow plants in a more sustainable way. ‘There are over half a million hectares of domestic gardens in Britain, so there is such an opportunity to support wildlife and boost biodiversity through the plants that we choose,’ explains Jonny. ‘It is not just about which plants we grow, but how they are grown, too. When I left for the Netherlands in 2016, many people said it was unrealistic to run an organic plant nursery but, in the past 10 years, there has been a noticeable change. People want to support local businesses and increasingly recognise the value of traditional specialist nurseries as a source of quality plants, in contrast to garden centres and supermarkets. It’s an exciting time to be growing perennials’.
The Field Nursery, Siddington, Gloucestershire will be open by appointment: thefieldnursery.com
