Klinta Tradgard

I first became aware of Peter Korn when I started volunteering at York Gate Garden in Adel, Leeds. There had been some considerable building work at the garden over the previous couple of years to create new areas of the garden, one of these new areas was a tiered, circular planting area that was to be planted with Mediterranean species, the substrate being pure river sand to a minimum depth of 30cm. Ben Preston and Jack Ogg (head and senior gardeners) explained they had attended the Beth Chatto symposium where they had seen Peter’s presentation on his methodology and were directly inspired to create a garden using sand as the substrate.

As my studies progressed, I became aware of other people whose methodologies seemed to reference or be linked to Peters, such as James Hitchmough, Nigel Dunnett, and Cassian Schmidt to name a few. Their work encompasses various ideas of promoting biodiversity, low maintenance yet high ornamental value gardens and public spaces, species selection for future climates and naturalistic design with a deep understanding of the ecology of the species used. I decided to read the Peter Korn book ‘Giving plants what they want’ as a way of trying to understand the thought process behind the new garden and his methodology with the hope that it would be useful for me whilst working at York Gate. I subsequently realised the importance of the work that Peter has done to refine this methodology, the importance as we move to peat free growing mediums, species rich biodiverse spaces and the potential application for civic plantings and gardens in this country. I decided that I would try to contact him to visit and spend some time learning from him.