Sounds like a good model. Let’s have a look at some of your five books.

Your first choice is Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, which is a classic manual offering lots of information on woody trees and shrubs.

This is an American book, a very comprehensive book about woody plants. It is absolutely for the serious gardener. If you are in a nursery and you are looking at a magnolia and you are not sure whether it is just the right magnolia for you, all you have to do is to whip out your Dirr and check it out. He will tell you what growing conditions it would prefer. He will have many rare and unusual varieties listed. It is a very fine guide to what you plant.

Why do you think trees are so important for landscaping?

Trees are often the bones of a garden. Many people have tree collections alone. Small trees and flowering trees are very gardenesque. Trees are important in so many ways. They add a lot of summer protection. You want the shade of your trees to grow your shade-loving plants or just to make your house more comfortable in hot summer weather. Trees give scale to a garden and nobility. I don’t think any garden feels right without its trees. Maybe there are a few – something like an Alpine garden doesn’t need trees. But every other type of garden does.

Robin Lane Fox’s Thoughtful Gardening is all about how to garden in harmony with nature.

That’s right and I put it on the list because it is also a fun book! I think he is the most important garden writer writing in English today. He belongs to the great pantheon of 19th and 20th century English garden writers who have informed the whole world, not just British gardeners, about good gardening. These articles that he wrote for The Financial Times are all very informative and highly amusing. It is a very good read. I think among all the current gardening books this is the most useful and fun.

When I speak to English gardeners there is a big theme about how gardeners are trying to get back to nature and work with nature. Is that something which is popular in the US as well?

There is a great fashion here now for native plants. You mentioned the native plant garden that we are building. We have always had a native plant garden to show the plants of the northeastern United States. That was mainly didactic, whereas the new one is meant to be very glamorous and beautiful to show people how they can use native plants in the same ways that we have always used more exotic plants, such as delphiniums and irises and peonies. None of these are American but we have always used them to make our flower gardens beautiful. But there are important ways that people now understand how to use native plants. They are more disease resistant because they belong here. There are many sunflowers from this part of the US that are much easier to grow than white delphiniums, for example. That doesn’t mean we won’t grow white delphiniums – we do – but we are expanding the plant palette.

And this is not just an American interest right now. It has also been a great interest in Germany. And with people like Piet Oudolf, a Dutch designer who uses many native American plants. There is a major garden at Wisley [the Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship garden in Surrey, England] where many of the plants are native to North America. It is a kind of prairie design aesthetic.

It sounds lovely, and I wanted to talk to you about what you see as the American style of gardening. I know that there is a much more varied landscape than here in the UK, but do you think there is a style that typifies what you do in the States?

Our climate is less hospitable. I know you all complain about your climate all the time but it is actually very good for flower gardens. Our climate is much harsher. We have harsher winters and harsher summers. We have more humidity in the summer. We have more violent storms and the wind is a greater issue here than it is for you. So here it is harder to grow refined flowering plants in your garden. We still do it, but native American plants are tougher and easier to grow, so we blend the two palettes.

Also, there is a new American style, which uses ornamental grasses and other very tough plants that are happier in this difficult climate. In this new American style, there is often a sweeping landscape full of a single ornamental grass or two or three used in very large grandiose swathes. There are fewer walled gardens or traditional mixed borders surrounding a clipped lawn – that English model – although it does still exist here.