Great Dixter House and Gardens — Natalie Crist Fine Gardening & Design

Naciim Benkreira was the first person I encountered at Great Dixter House this past spring. Noticing how awestruck I was, he said, “I know. It’s like the punk rock of English gardening.” And so it is. The 15th century manorhouse is surrounded by a garden that is as mouthwateringly beautiful as it is biodiverse. Naciim is the 2024 Ruth Borun Scholar and has spent the entire year learning nuanced methods of interacting with this complex, painterly landscape. He was kind enough to discuss his path in horticulture and his time spent in residence at Dixter. The following are excerpts from our conversation interspersed with photos of the garden in riotous bloom last May.

NC: Want to start by sharing your background?

NB: I'm one of six from a multicultural family in DC. Growing up in the nineties, DC was very liberal and progressive; it’s a very green city.

I majored in Community and International Development at UVM. That area of New England is ahead of the game in regenerative ecological practices. There are a lot of great professors there. There’s aguy named John Todd at UVM who came up with this idea of living machines. He would create gardens that were closed cycle loops to restore waste and use relationships in nature to solve problems.

I got into horticulture through regenerative farming and community development projects. I wanted to help others. You can learn a lot about other cultures through growing food. A friend turned me on to permaculture, which opened the gate regarding multi-layered thinking and regenerative design practices. I helped start a biodynamic homestead in Vermont.

Like you were saying, permaculture isn’t sexy enough for some horticulturists. But it offers a lot of insightful creative design elements, particularly geared to post-peak oil and climate instability. Holistic management or regenerative farming is ahead of the actual practice of horticulture. I think the gears need to turn a little more quickly.

When I moved to New York, I was helping run a distillery. It was a pretty bougie life. I was living in Williamsburg, commuting on the ferry into Greenport. If you're ever out there, it's called Matchbook Distilling.

Sourcing food and turning it into alcohol wasn't what stimulated me. So I came back to DC and did a summer internship at Dumbarton Oaks. My first full-time job in horticulture was at the National Cathedral which is an amazing space, but very challenging because it's open 24 hours to the public.

Coming into the horticulture world, most of my mentors have been women, which I think is unusual. Women and artists teaching me how to form my own language with nature has made me who I am.

I didn't know this could be a career; it just happened. There's a whole world within horticulture and many sub-worlds. If you look at the future of gardening or human land stewardship it’s folks coming from all different backgrounds. With problems like global warming and climate instability, we need creative solutions and multi-disciplinary perspectives. We've separated ourselves so far from our relationship with nature that we look for silver-bullet answers to problems when gardening is so dynamic.

I came back to visit my friends at work in DC and one of these older guys was like, Alright. So, at Dixter do you collect the leaves, or do you leave the leaves? And I said, Well, it depends. Then he asks, What about cutting things back? Do you cut things back, or do you leave them? And I said, It depends. He was so frustrated. I think we try to find simple answers to nature when they are more complex and dynamic, more moving and breathing.

What got me interested in gardening was indigenous cultures and communities, especially in the Americas, and the complex ways they viewed their relationship with nature.

I think when the Old World came to America, they were like, Wow! Look at this rich, abundant place. But they didn't see the people who were creating that. There's an ecologist named David Suzuki out in Washington who writes about why the salmon cycles are so abundant in the Pacific Northwest. It's because the indigenous communities there would cater to the ecosystems to provide a service. So the salmon would go upstream further and further versus, “Oh, this is just what nature does.”

I want people to be open to that. It's really about finding their own language in nature. I think that's fascinating.

At Dixter, people see this wild luscious garden. Christopher Lloyd had a great quote – I forget exactly what it is. But basically, if you are into gardening, why not make it intense? Why not make it more dynamic You come here and think, Oh, so wild! You're letting it do this by itself. But really, no. We sowed all those poppies. We actively plant high-density and low-density areas to mimic nature and break those patterns.

*The Long Border, replete with poppies last spring.*

NC: You’re at Great Dixter as this year’s Ruth Borun Scholar. How did that come about?

NB: There's the romantic story, and then there's the truth. I'll tell you the truth. I googled the wrong thing. I'm not the best speller. But I stumbled upon Great Dixter, and I started reading about the biodiversity audit and got obsessed. I saw an opportunity to come here and I looked at the application due date. It was in a week. I was like, I gotta do this – the the biodiversity, the not spraying – I just didn't think you could make a garden this beautiful.

I hate writing about myself, but I just told myself to be honest. I had friends in a Google doc editing grammar behind me while I was writing. Then I got an interview, and they said yes. Ruth Borun was a close friend of Christopher LLoyd’s and her family continued her memory by sponsoring a student every year. I’m one of the lucky sponsors.

NC: You’re the first person I met when I arrived at Dixter. I think you could tell I was awestruck, and you said, “I know, it’s like the punk rock of English gardening.” I thought, what a great way to describe it.

NB: Counterculture, a hundred percent. There are just so many different layers of succession. Right now, I'm calling you from the mess hall in the sunken garden. It's so well designed that the plants just push themselves through the next layer. There are places at Dixter that are highly intensive, but there are other places that are so well-designed that plants just work together.

I think my one of my favorite moments is the ancient coppiced woodland. The first round is wood anemones. And then you come back and it's all bluebells, then it's ramps – white allium star flowers up in the air.

Dixter has taught me to be more observant. Christopher Lloyd was a big proponent of seeing plants in the wild to see their personalities. My time here has opened my eyes to making these combinations that are provocative or striking.

NC: What’s a typical day like there?

NB: Usually we meet under the thatch in the sunken garden. Fergus [Garrett] will go over what we need to do, and we usually sweep the paths. We're very low-tech, no leaf blowers or anything. We each have a very worn down bristly broom, and you better show up early to get the better broom. And as we're sweeping, we’re looking around at what's going on, seeing the plant combinations.

I was trained to cut everything back when it's dead. But Fergus would say, Alright, cut that back, leave that Verbascum stock. It has a nice caramel color. And so you leave that. But then in four days, he will tell me to cut that stock. It's very dynamic and highly responsive.

NC: Can you tell me about the biodiversity audit?

NB: Originally it was just going to be outside the garden. A lot of entomologists and ecologists were not interested in gardens, because much of their work goes into conservation and saving natural spaces.

So [Fergus] invited the Royal Society of Arachnids, the group of spider people, and said Hey, come to Dixter. You can use the Great Hall for your for your annual meeting. The story goes that they came outside during breaks and immediately saw a spider that hadn't been documented in a long time.

So they started exploring the garden. It opened up this world where – I think to us gardeners it makes perfect sense – the highly intensive gardens were way more biodiverse than any of the surrounding outside areas. It goes back into that dynamic stewardship, that we are very much a part of the landscape … experimenting, leaving leaves, having more dynamic plantings, more succession plantings. And letting things look caramel brown in the bed and not cutting them back.

*Areas of intensive cultivation adjacent to the meadow.*

We are constantly learning here, constantly walking around with notebooks, looking at bedding pockets, and trying to figure out how to make things better. Did I tell you about the pot arrangements?

They're very beautiful, and they allow us to use the contrast of textures and colors, and different shapes of leaves and structures. But they also let us trial plants. So if we have a plant that we're not used to, we'll put it in a pot and we'll walk by and watch it. And then we're like, Oh, what if we want this plant with that plant? We will move the pots together to see if they have personality.

So at Dixter, it looks like we're doing all these wild things. But we've actually have taken creative steps to make good decisions. Sometimes. Not all the time [laughter.] But that's our method.

Talking about living systems and permaculture, I think one really good principle is stacking functions – having things for multiple reasons. And leaving things on site, using what's available. A lot of things at Dixter stay at Dixter. We have various compost systems. We don't burn anything. We don't throw any of our plant material out. I've worked at public gardens where they'll cut up [an ancient tree] and throw it in a dumpster. We try to keep everything here as much as we can as a closed loop, try to be resourceful with whatever is on the property versus immediately thinking of bringing in outside resources.

NC: This reminds me, a couple of years ago the theme at Chelsea was Rewilding. They had created a beautiful garden to capture the spirit of something that had been left alone. It was right across from an RHS pollinator garden that was heavily cultivated. I happened to be standing next to this elderly gentleman, and he said, “The rewilded habitat is wonderful, but look at how many more insects are in the cultivated garden. Really, it’s not wrong to have a careful hand in nature.”

And I thought that was a wise perspective. Humans have wreaked such havoc on the environment that a lot of well-meaning people feel like we need to just leave it alone. But I’m not so sure the answer is abdication. People and plants have complementary designs; we can be better together. It dovetails with what you're saying – how the areas under heavy cultivation have much more life.

NB: You need people in the landscape. This is my personal opinion. I understand the motives behind rewilding, but I don't necessarily agree with all of it. I think it could be a step in the right direction. To say let nature take its course, or let's have a no-maintenance garden, I think, no. I think gardening is a highly skilled intellectual career. You should have gardeners directing that and not remove them from the equation.

NC: It’s so baked into our culture that we are somehow separate from nature.

NB: How would you change that perspective? Or bridge that gap?

NC: I think one answer is education. Most people don't take the time to learn about these things. Ultimately the systems that we are living in right now are so unstable. The world that you and I work in is the real world. Nature is reality. I think that so many other jobs or disciplines are just abstractions. At the end of the day, if you pull the electrical plug, what’s left? So getting people to think about reality. Is that overly simplistic?

NB: I agree with you. Gardening has taught me to be present with myself. They say there are the three H's – you use your hand, your heart, and your head when you garden. It teaches you to be present with the reality of nature.

NC: What do you hope to do when you come back to the States?

NB: My interest was always in changing the perspective of what a garden is. Plants don't have to be in groups of three to be a pattern. They don’t have to be in straight rows. It doesn't have to be completely mulched. It doesn't have to be clean. It could be wild, it could be some weird pot arrangement that only brings you joy. I want to bring more freedom and more looseness to gardening.

And I've always loved teaching. I don't know in which capacity I'll teach what I've learned, but I know in some way I will. I am a completely different gardener now than I was when I first got here.

NC: How so?

NB: There are the practical skills, like propagation. I feel very confident in all-around propagation. Sowing seeds. Fergus has given me a root and said I want 120 bamboo splits off of this. I'm like, alright. Here's 150. I'd never taken cuttings and made things. I’ve learned a lot about design. But I also think I’ve learned how to be a softer gardener. How to make really dynamic beds that are always interesting whether [they’re] blooming or not and how to listen to nature.

NB: I also think of gardening as more of a creative thing [now.] I've never considered myself an artist, nor do I want to, but embracing more of who I am and letting that flow through creativity has been a really big thing. To come up with multiple combinations in my notebook. You have to have five ready, because the first one they're going to say, No, no, that's not going to work. Well, what about this? So having multiple ideas about things all the time.

I love growing food; I miss it so much. But this kind of gardening has the power to inspire. We're spending so much time and energy to create moments. For someone to see that hummingbird moth land on that monarda. That is the power of horticulture, and it doesn't have to be far away in a garden in England it could be in cities, it could be on a sidewalk.

Whether you want to grow the community or you want to build resilience in your life, your quality of life will be enhanced if you form a relationship with nature. Whether it's an actual career, or just putting your hands in the soil.

One of the the best things about the horticulture community is that people look out for each other. People will drop what they’re doing to answer your emails or help you. It's a very loving community that wants to support each other because we all want to thrive in it, and be better people, better gardeners.

I'm really inspired by a lot of these young kids who are coming into the game right now. They're questioning a lot of rules. We just had this guy named Adam Banks, who was the Garden Club of America scholar, he had the most incredible attitude. There's a guy named John Hayden [of The Farm in Between, author of Farming on the Wild Side,] Keith Morris of Prospect Rock Permaculture, and Ben Falk Permaculture.

NC: What would you tell someone considering a career in horticulture?

NB: I would be real with them. It's a great career if you want to be outside, and if you want to learn something new every day. It's challenging. It's multidisciplinary. You have to be a problem solver. Stretch in the morning! If you want to build a better relationship with yourself and nature, and you've had this calling, you should try it.

I think that's [another factor.] How do we communicate that gardening is a highly skilled job? I think a lot of those barriers need to change. Gardeners need to get paid more, they need more support. The public needs to have a better connection with plants and nature, and that's the gardener's role, to connect. It's like the DJ, showing you new tunes. The gardener is there to show you.

NC: Thank you Naciim, for generously sharing your time and knowledge.