Peter Korn’s Old Garden
Just after Gothenburg, I rode past Peter Korn’s old garden and checked it out. Peter Korn is a horticulturalist with some garden-world reknown for using thick top-dressings of sand in his plantings. I’d read about him and his sand technique here and here and maybe a couple other places, and I’d listened to a couple of talks on youtube; I like this one he gave for a Beth Chatto Gardens conference, but the others are good too. The sand thing is interesting. I recommend listening to his talk to really learn about it.
The garden I visited is his first garden, the one where he developed his sand technique. He left it some years ago and moved to southern Sweden; it’s now tended by another professional gardener, Max, who was kind enough to let me visit. Maybe I’d have have done better to visit the garden during its heyday or maybe I’d do better to visit the new garden, but I liked seeing this one in its post-creator phase. It’s nicely maintained by Max with a bit of a loose grip, a lovely expansive space, fun to explore, charming.
These beds are mounded up — which is a standard practice in the Bay Area — using many tons of sand — which is very non-standard. I don’t see the sand catching on in the Bay Area, it’s resource intensive and seems a solution to Swedish gardening challenges rather than California ones, but I’d be interested to see someone try it here.
Fallow fields in Sweden tend to fill with these plants, Goldenrod, Fireweed, and to a lesser degree Mullein and what I think is Queen Anne’s Lace. Some of the beds have a lot of it, some not as much. It’s pretty either way. I like a garden with a wild vibe.
I think the rocky outcrop was deliberately exposed to make a rock garden, and I think in its heyday it had a lot of alpine plants.
Overall it’s a nice woodsy garden to explore.
Tree stumps covered by Sagina or similar, one of my favorite elements in the garden.
It’s a huge garden and I appreciate the effort by Peter to create it and now from Max to maintain it. My thanks to Max for letting me visit.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2025 at 3:42 pm and is filed under private gardens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
