Growing the Future – New Gardening Ideas for Your Garden

Discover 4 exciting new gardening ideas from Errol Fernandes and the Horniman Museum & Gardens: a low water use planting, a micro-forest (think new type of hedge!), a clever way with old grasses & stems in winter and a gentle way of regenerating a tired border and restoring it to health.

Head of Horticulture Errol Fernandes shares how he’s transforming this historic site with fresh approaches that work with your garden’s conditions—not against them. These ideas are especially useful if you’re dealing with changing weather patterns, urban soils, or simply want to support more wildlife. These innovative gardening ideas are perfect for 21st-century gardens.

00:00 Welcome
00:02 The Horniman Museum & Gardens: https://www.horniman.ac.uk/
00:20 Errol Fernandes on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/errolreubenfernandes/?hl=en
01:41 The Xerophytic (low water use) Garden
04:35 Errol’s three top resilient plants
07:03 The Miyawaki micro forest
12:25 Can you plant a micro forest in a small area?
13:57 An artistic way of clearing away grasses for or after winter – The Prairie Garden
18:16 The Sunken Garden – reviving a tired border with replant disease
23:21 Mixing wildflowers and self-seeders in a herbaceous border
26:00 How to have a gorgeous garden and support wildlife video: https://youtu.be/l7VGjBOby5I

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I’ve just visited the Horniman Museum and Gardens 
in South London to talk to Head of Horticulture Errol Fernandes about some of the new ways of 
gardening they’re pioneering there. It’s Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube 
channel and blog. And as well as being a Head of Horticulture or Head Gardener, Errol is also a 
TV presenter and he gives talks for international horticultural events such as the Beth Chatto 
Symposium about these innovative gardening techniques. When you go into the Horniman the 
first thing you’ll see is the xerophytic garden, or the low water use garden, and that’s something 
that you might be interested in if you have very poor soil, or you’ve had a big building project, 
or perhaps you’ve bought a new build house and there’s a lot of rubble in your garden. Walk a 
little further along and you’ll discover their micro forest – not something perhaps for very 
small gardens, but for larger or middle-sized gardens. It doesn’t take up a lot more room than 
a hedge, and it is much less work. Also people who want to have a tidy garden in winter, but 
still want to be wildlife friendly, would be very interested to see what he does in the prairie 
garden at the Horniman. And a border that is constantly replanted with annuals, for decades, 
will suffer from replant disease and very poor soil – and that’s what he faced. And so finding 
out how he brought that border back to health, in the simplest and most nature friendly way 
possible, is fascinating. You’re doing some quite interesting different sorts of things 
here, so I’d like to just go through them, and then we’ll work out how we could perhaps do 
them in our own gardens. So let’s start off with what I would call the dry garden. Yes, so we refer 
to that area, that you’re referring to, as our xerophytic garden. All of the plants that are in 
that area are xerophytes – so plant species that have an adaptation to be able to cope with extreme 
weather conditions, in particular drought. So the project came about because in 2020 we launched a 
climate and ecology manifesto, and that overarches everything that we do in the entire museum; so 
internally and externally with our sixteen and a half acres. And we had this area at the front 
of the museum – it’s a real showpiece area – but it was looking a little bit tired. It wasn’t 
unpleasant, but it had phormium and bamboo – some of those plants were running rampant and causing a 
little bit of damage with the paving – and we felt that there was an opportunity for some change. It 
was a south facing area, it’s really really bright and sunny, there’s very very busy London roads 
– quite polluting – but also I feel perhaps even maybe a bit of a Gulfstream effect, of keeping the 
area almost like in a microclimate. And we’ve got this amazing sandstone frontage that retains heat 
as well. So there was a fantastic opportunity. We dovetailed that with a big pathway project that 
we had planned in the garden, and we knew that all the paths were going to be lifted and re-laid, 
and the subbase that would have normally gone to landfill – we retained all of that. So sort of 
crushed concrete, Type 1 MoT, and it was about 15 tons of material. So rather than sending that 
material to landfill, we wanted to retain it in line with our climate and ecology manifesto. So 
we essentially dug quite deep trenches, and filled it with some of the bulkier material – so big 
boulders and rocks – so essentially it’s concrete boulders really. And then we mixed the spoil with 
the rest of the concrete. And then on the very top we’ve got concrete fines. So the material was sort 
of graded, but if you like we were just taking it from a spoil heap of our contractor, and using 
it and being quite sort of particular about how we laid this on the ground, in the area that we 
were doing. And we also just kind of played with the topography to create different little tiny 
micro-climates. So on the north side for example you’d have often little shaded pockets. And in 
the south side there might be little dips that might protect something, quite sort of cold. So 
the next area we’d like to look at is the micro forest. And I think this is a really interesting 
thing because you planted that really alongside the road. So it’s going to – although it’s quite 
a small area – it is going to protect some of the noise and the pollution from the road, isn’t 
it? Yes. So just before I arrived, the museum had hoped to plant a green corridor of 60 silver 
birch trees along that busy London road area, where we adjoin the busy London road, and it’s 
one of London’s most polluting roads. We wanted to sort of create a bit of a buffer against that 
noise, but also that pollution for the garden. In my previous role I was working in Hamstead, 
and I’d noticed in Hamstead Garden Suburb that there was a small planting of trees in a local 
area. And I found out a little bit more, and it was a micro forest planted in the Miyawaki style. 
So I was intrigued and thought that I’d find out, do a little bit more research, and essentially 
what Miyawaki was doing in the 1970s was observing naturalized forests – naturalized tree plantings. 
And essentially the forests that he was observing were growing where the seed had fallen – so often 
in very close proximity to one another – and what he saw was that quite dense thicket would develop 
very very quickly, creating a closed canopy in as little as three to five years. And he developed 
this method and it became quite popular, certainly in Japan, America, Scandinavia. And I think ours 
might have been around the sixth micro forest that I was aware of in the UK. And so we did an open 
call for funds. I mean we wanted the public to feel a sense of ownership of the project, and of 
course projects cost money, and we’re a charitable trust, so it was nice to have a fantastic response 
to that open call. And we were able to make a selection of a large number of trees. So the 
wonderful thing that this project enabled us to do was to plant just under 900 trees in 400 square 
meters – so that gives you an idea of how dense the planting is – and we selected 35 different 
species. Miyawaki stated that something that was very important was PNV – potential natural 
vegetation – and what he was really referring to is native species – native to the local area. 
However with our climate and ecology manifesto, again, we’re in the midst of a climate change 
and in 50 years it’s going to be more akin to a Mediterranean region than it than it is currently. 
It felt very important, particularly when planting trees, to consider species from further afield, 
that might be able to cope with the changes in temperature. And really the sporadic changes – you 
know sometimes it’s intensely wet, sometimes it’s intensely cold, and sometimes it’s extremely 
hot and dry – so we wanted really resilient species. That’s not to say that we didn’t plant 
native species. It’s extremely important to plant the native species, because we want even the 
species like silver birch that are struggling, we want to continue to plant them, so that their 
progeny will be more tolerant in years to come. So we selected a broad range of native and non-native 
species, and some really exciting combinations. So we’re thinking about sort of creating a 
dense canopy. We’re thinking about sort of urban cooling. We’re thinking about well-being 
for people. We’re thinking about a broad range, to support a broad range of other wildlife as 
well. So we were really trying to do a lot with this planting, as well as taking into account the 
natural topography and soil conditions in an area, you’re taking all of these things into account. 
At the very start, planting extremely young small trees, so everything’s pencil thickness, pencil 
height, at the same age. So sourcing those was a bit tricky, and planting them in as little as 40 
cm apart, at times, 40-50 cm apart. And then they compete with each other for light and nutrients 
and water, and then they start romping away. And so we’re now three years on and some of the trees 
are sort of standing 15 feet tall which is just sort of staggering. So when you often sort of 
think that forests you know are for the future, actually within three years we’ve got a really 
fantastic growth. And some of the trees are now coming into flower. And we enjoyed really stunning 
autumn colour last year in just such a short space of time. So these trees will never reach the great 
big statuesque heights of the broadly spaced trees that we are used to. The best way to think about 
this is a sort of like a motorway roadside tree planting, just with many many more different 
species. So it’s going to sort of be capped in height, which is important by that busy road, 
but it’s also important in terms of particulate pollution filtration. And the intensive way that 
this forest grows as well means that these trees will sequester much more carbon than the regular 
kind of tree plantings that we’re accustomed to. What would you say is the sort of minimum 
square area you’d need to do this kind of planting? I don’t think you need much, 
and I’m a huge champion of this method, and I think that we should be making micro-forest 
plantings in our cities all over the place really, because of the amazing ecosystem engineering that 
they provide – but also for the biodiversity that they provide – but I think that 3 meters by 3 
meters would be adequate, Like you don’t need much. I think the key point is that by planting 
them close together they sort of keep each other in check. So you can cram a lot of trees into 
a 3m by 3m area, but they’re not going to get massive. The thing that’s important to mention is 
that you mustn’t prune these trees. You make your selection, you plant them young, and then you 
hands-off. I think the most important piece of maintenance that we did on this micro forest was 
mulching with a clean straw mulch to make sure that the grass and weeds didn’t sort of crowd them 
out early on, because it would be very difficult to maintain in between these very tiny saplings. 
But that’s all that we’ve done. We haven’t done anything else. Think of it like a native hedge, 
just without the pruning. So just kind of make a dense planting of trees and then step back. And 
try and be really creative about the selection of trees – and there are some fantastic nurseries 
that are doing plug-grown trees that you can get you know really broad selections from. Lovely. And 
now let’s think about the prairie garden. Yes, so the prairie garden was designed in collaboration 
with Professor James Hitchmough in 2018, before I arrived, and it’s planted in 15cm of 
gravel, and it’s broadly North American and South African species. And that gravel – a sort 
of growing medium – sort of keeps the crowns from rotting in the winter. So it’s a really 
interesting planting. The changes that we’ve made are really about how we maintain this area. It’s 
important with the prairie garden that we cut and take away all of the material. And the reason for 
that is because these plants – being from North American and South African prairies – they would 
die if a soil layer developed around their crowns. And they’d die in the winter because that soil 
layer would hold moisture close to the crowns, and the crowns would rot and die in the cold and 
wet – the combination of the cold and wet through the winter. So we do this meticulous cutting and 
taking away to maintain that area – and we do that in the third week in March. Now when we were doing 
some baseline studies with an ecologist recently, we were having a discussion about the maintenance 
of this area. I’d become aware that the prairie garden buzzes with invertebrates through 
the summer. And they’re not just feeding from those plant species. They make those plant 
species their home, and their breeding ground. And all too often when we’re cutting the material 
back in March, we find the hollow stems are filled with invertebrates, or underneath the 
echinacea seedheads there’ll be little clusters of ladybirds, sort of sheltering from the cold. 
And it’s too cold for these species to emerge at that point, and like so many gardeners we cut that 
material back, we throw it on the compost heap, and we’re turning all of that life into the 
compost. In discussing this with the ecologist Johnny Johnson, he suggested we just leave it. Now 
he’s not a horticulturalist, and I can’t leave it, because these plants would die. So instead of 
cutting and taking away, we’re now tying this material to posts, so that it’s kind of there’s a 
clear message to the public, I think, in reading these sculptural kind of forms that we’ve got. 
They almost look a bit sort of paganistic, sort of somewhere where the witches have hung up 
their broomsticks or something. But essentially that it allows birds that are nesting at this time 
to take material – there’s plenty of seed for the birds and other animals too – and all of those 
invertebrates that are overwintering in those hollow stems have the chance to emerge. Now the 
key with our prairie garden is that those stands, those bundles of material, are taken away by 
mid June. And that’s because the prairie garden requires the full baking sort of sunlight and 
warmth. And if we leave them standing in place, they’ll be a shadow on the north side that 
will impede the growth of the other plants in the prairie garden. So we must take them 
away. But each year we put them back. And it’s had a fantastic response from the horticultural 
community, in terms of resonance really. I think a lot of people have sort of identified that 
bit as being a bit of an issue. The key is just making sure that we’re not too quick to dispose of 
this material. Of course we need to cut it back, and we’ve got a very clear reason for needing to 
cut it back, because we’ve got this gravel mulch. But of course people want to tidy up their gardens 
in early spring, and that’s fine. And of course insects are in decline – certainly flying insects, 
and certainly in our cities – so it’s really important that we make a space for them. But yes, 
you could just create a teepee with some old hazel sticks or something, and cram that full with cut 
grasses and hollow stems. Just pile it all the way up – it could look quite sculptural and beautiful 
– or like we do, weave big hazel poles into the ground because they’ll take a long time to rot, 
and we tie the bundles to those, and they stand in the border. And the response from our visitors is 
really positive too. People think they look really wonderful. So, the sunken garden. When you arrived 
it was quite a traditional bedding garden, wasn’t it? So, tell us about what you did with that. 
So yes. So the sunken garden has been quite an intensively cultivated area since the 1930s. So we 
were planting bedding from seed in the glass house in the nursery here, and rowing it out in quite a 
traditional method. And then a rotavator was also being used to turn the soil, remove all of that 
bedding. Bulbs and bedding were being composted each year at great expense. And then we’d replant 
again for the sort of early spring display, and then there’d be a summer display – a spring summer 
display and a winter display – two displays. And it’s really costly, but also quite an 
unsustainable damaging process really – and a lot of water being used. And then I think the thing 
that really swung the change for the Horniman was because we’d sort of tested the soil, and it 
came back positive for phytopythium – a sort of soil-borne sort of replant disease. And this 
was causing an issue with the annual plants that we were growing. And really the place that 
that disease came from was really because there was no real crop rotation going on there. It 
was sort of bedding upon bedding upon bedding. So there was a desire for a move away from this 
annual bedding to a more perennial planting. So we have essentially curated this area to align with 
our bird and invertebrate collection within the museum, and all of the species make links to birds 
and invertebrates in some way. So it might be that they produce a food source, or there’s a nesting 
material, or a particular species that they’re drawing in. And we’ve essentially approached that 
change in an incremental kind of slow way, rather than a broad sweep of removing everything at once. 
We began by planting bulbs extremely deeply, so that they’re more perennial. So things like tulips 
being planted extremely deeply – sort of eight or nine inches deep – which was quite a laborious 
task for our 35 volunteers that we have here that attend each week. But in doing so I think we’re 
3 years on and we’re still getting flower from those same tulip bulbs. So it means less kind of 
intervention, less digging, less disruption of the soil. We’ve got the bulbs, they’re in the ground, 
and they’re staying there for some time. And then what we can do is top those up with the same 
species, and then you get a variation in bloom size which looks beautifully naturalistic, which 
is lovely. So that was what we began with. And then we were over-sowing. Rather than growing 
annuals in the glasshouse, we were broadcast sowing our annual wildflower mixes for a couple 
of years. And that was just really to rest the soil. So we did that for two years, where we’re 
just broadcast sowing – no digging – and then when we came to removing that material we just cut 
using a sickle. So leaving the soil undisrupted. At the same time as we were broadcast sowing that 
annual display, we were also mixing in myosotis into that mix, so that we’d have a beautiful foil 
for our spring display. So we’re multi-layering the seed mixes so to speak. So we’ve got an annual 
display in there. And then we’ve got the myosotis, the forget-me-nots in the mix too, so that when 
we sickled off the top growth of that summer display – once it had dropped its seeds – we had 
the myosotis already there, growing at the base, that would then be a foil the following spring for 
the bulb display. So we were sort of layering up the planting and trying to be as hands-off for 
a couple of years to rest that soil and allow a balance of the bacteria within the soil to 
resettle. And then came the following wave. So we then planted waves of trees, trees and shrubs, 
so small trees and shrubs in the area. Roses and herbaceous. And it’s now in its second year. I 
think we’ve done two waves of herbaceous planting, and it’s starting to fill out and look really 
great. And the other thing that we did is we deepened the pond, and that was really crucial. 
So there was a pond in the central bed, and unfortunately the pond was only 20 cm deep, and 
so it was a bit of a death pool really. Anything that would fall in there would boil in the summer 
months. And so it needed deepening, so we deepened that by 70 cm so that it could sustain life, and 
we can grow a broad range of plants. And we now have a lovely population of amphibians in there 
too. That of course helps with the whole ecosystem in that area. And do the wild flowers that you 
planted, do some of them come back? Yes, that was some of the thinking. So we really wanted to 
kind of govern what our weeds, if you like, would be in the future. So we’re wanting a really broad 
range of species in this area. So while we have the perennials and the shrubs and the bulbs, we’ve 
also got these annuals that sort of pop up in between, in the gaps in between. Of course myself 
and my team edit those a little bit – keep them where we want – but it’s nice to have a seedbank 
in the soil of beautiful plants that will sort of perpetuate. And depending on the climate and the 
different sequences that happen each year, you get a different flush of plants – which is also quite 
exciting. And you mentioned that in the sunken garden, that was inspired by some of the exhibits 
in the museum. And when you go into the Horniman I can see that it says this is about connecting 
you with the global culture and the natural environment. So in what way does the displays in 
the museum inform the plant? OK, so within the gardens we have various display beds. So we have 
the materials bed, we have the dye border, we have the medicinal border, and even the prairie garden 
makes direct links to the museum collections within the cabinets. With the sunken garden we 
were really looking at the bird and invertebrate collection, so we’ve got a vast collection of 
taxidermy birds and insects, and we’re constantly trying to make links between the two collections – 
the collection in the garden and the collection in the museum. So there are specific plant species, 
plant species like spindle – that has a lovely story of it being an overwintering species for 
black bean aphid, and then being sort of removed from the hedgerows after the second world war. 
There’s a general sense that every single plant has been selected for a species of bird, or a 
species of invertebrate, or perhaps creating a nesting environment, or attracting perhaps a 
plant – attracts a certain type of pollinator that we know that bird species are going to 
be interested in. We’ve made the selection sort of based on the bird species that we have on 
display in the museum, and also through talking to our ecologists, and from our own observations of 
what’s present or not in the gardens, and perhaps is present or known to be present in South London. 
So plants like dipsacus – that might be considered by some as a weed – we as gardeners know that 
if there is a little pocket of dipsacus, it will almost certainly attract goldfinches. So that’s 
one lovely example of a plant that needs to be kept an eye on because they can seed everywhere, 
but I wouldn’t be without it in this particular area because it’s loved by the goldfinches. We 
have these lovely stands of sorbus vilmarinii, which has these beautiful white berries that 
persist through into the winter – really stunning for people, but a very very lovely food 
source for the waxwing. And we know that waxwings have been seen feeding on them in South London. 
I’ve never seen a waxwing in the wild actually, and I’d love to see one, so planting stands of 
sorbus vilmarinii felt like a lovely thing to do. In the scented garden too. We have over 35 
volunteers that attend each week, from our local community, that’s extremely diverse. I think it’s 
important to remember that we are the Horniman Museum and Gardens. We’re not one or the other. 
We’re free at the point of access. Access is really important to us. We want people to come 
and enjoy this fantastic space. If you’d like to have a gorgeous garden but still be wildlife 
friendly and sustainable, there is another video that I think you won’t want to miss, which is 
seven lessons from Great Dixter, where Fergus Garrett shares his experience. And that’s coming 
up next. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!