GLOBAL GARDEN ADVENTURER, PLANTSWOMAN LUCIE WILLAN
- Jennifer Jewell
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
This week on Cultivating Place you are in for a real summer adventure on a global garden armchair tour of sorts with a plantswoman who has studied and gardened at some of the Western world’s best - from Sissinghurst, Hidcote, and Monk’s House in the UK, to Sparoza in Greece. Lucie Willan has great garden tales to tell. A perfect summer garden beach listen if there is one.
Lucie Willan is a scholar, a plantsperson, and gardener. She loves plants, and she loves gardens. Across her career, which started with more than a decade in the art world–specifically textile arts, she realized her love of plants represented in the textiles were more compelling than the textiles on their own and thus began her horticultural career. Since then she has learned and labored in some of amazing gardens of our time: including Vita Sackville West’s Sissinghurst, Lawrence Johnston’s Hidcote Manor, and Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Monk’s House Garden, all in the UK before she headed to Greece in the early days of the Pandemic to assist at Sparoza, an experimental garden on the outskirts of Athens, where they have savage summers and enormous biodiversity. The garden was created by Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, an early advocate for choosing plants to suit the conditions, and the garden is the headquarters of the Mediterranean Garden Society. Lucie Willan is very recently emeritus Head Gardener at Sparoza, after a 5 year tenure there.
For 20 years until her death in 1983, Tyrwhitt grew plants not just from Greece but from further afield, including South Africa, California, Mexico and Australia - as long as they could thrive in Athen's brutally hot and dry summers.
Tyrwhitt bequeathed the garden to the Goulandris Natural History Museum.
Sally Razelou was the subsequent custodian of Sparoza after Tyrwhitt's death, and led the garden for the next thirty years until her death in March 2021 – a handful of poignant months after Lucie’s arrival.
It was Sally who conceived the idea of establishing the Mediterranean Garden Society, which continues to sponsor Sparoza.
Lucie and I caught up just a few days after her 5 year tenure at Sparoza completed, and prior to her being a featured speaker at the Hardy Plant Society’s Summer Study Weekend in Portland Oregon a few weeks ago now.
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All Photos Courtesy of Lucie Willan, All rights reserved..
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JOIN US again next week, we visit a public garden and outdoor education center, which also serves as an Americorps training site. The Nature Place in LaCrosse, WI is a place where people & nature connect, where young and old meet, learn, and teach the wonder of tending and knowing wilder things. That's right here, next week. Listen in!
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Thinking out loud this week...
Hey, it's Jennifer—
Don’t you love plantspeople? I mean, don’t you love plants, which then leads us to love plantspeople. They are amazing. My ears are popping listening to the cultivating people Lucie has worked with, whose places she has helped to cultivate into the future. It’s pretty incredible.
Did you know of these two women who tended Sparoza - Mary Jaqueline Tyrwhitt and Sally Razelou? I did not until I did my research for this interview. Did you also know that Greece is home to more than 6000 plant taxa, around 1000 endemics – I did not and that is some serious plant biodiversity.
And wait till you hear Lucie’s 5 plants she wants us to know more about, definitely had me pulling out my plant encyclopedia – which is a great thing! One of the best lessons of plants not matter how old or how young, how new or how experienced: we’re all students to the plants.
With the act of learning plants and always learning more about tending them, I know I do not need to remind you all here in the Northern Hemisphere that it is now July. Well, it’s July in the Southern Hemisphere too haha but they mean slightly different things in the gardening/cultivating calendar. For us in Summer, it means that though we just got here to summer, it is not too early to be thinking about placing your bulb orders for fall, and not too early to be thinking about your last summer succession planting and your first fall seeds to be sown. For us that means carrots. For you it might means something else.
You have in all likelihood heard me say, more than once, that the how-to garden and the what-to-do-in-your-garden this week or month is best served very fresh and very local, especially as our climate shifts each year.
So in this week’s Public Growing Announcements, I give you homework: lean into the best how-to and when-to resources in your area. This might be your regional Extension office and Master Gardener program, could be your local grange, or garden club, or community garden, or independent nursery, OR local botanical garden’s demo spaces.
Go find them – let them remind you what should be coming up in tasks.
If you happen to be one of those resources, maybe reach out to a larger group or offer some gentle thoughts to a newer gardener….that’s how we grow – as Big G Gardeners, every act of gardening/of cultivating place with care is an opportunity to take better care of all of us, plants and animals.
More next week – until then – keep growing better beautifully.
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