That gardening genius Gordon Collier has probably never met a plant he didn’t like. What he doesn’t like are gardens with hard edges, or tidy gardens, or overdesigned ones, and gardens, or garden talk, which might be described as pompous. There is nothing pompous about Collier, or his gardens. They are expressions of his personality: exuberant, a bit eccentric, slightly rambling in a charismatic way.
He likes blurred lines. He likes the unexpected.
He was once described as a subversive gardener, a description he embraced with his customary gusto. He doesn’t follow rules. He doesn’t mind mixing orange with pink. He says he’s a cheeky gardener. “I do that just to provoke people.” He once painted a dead tree bright blue. Most people would have cut