Going green, diplomatically, at the British ambassador’s residence

The hermit thrush is a late-fall visitor to my garden, and if the neighborhood cats don’t get it, maybe one day I’ll hear its call, said to be a plaintive warble of passerine perfection.

I arrived home the other evening, in the drizzle, to find a newt perched on one of the pillars of the front door. It was the eastern redback salamander, and it seemed happy to let me pick it up and move it to a safe place.

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Adrian Higgins

Adrian Higgins has been writing about the intersection of gardening and life for more than 25 years, and joined the Post in 1994. He is the author of several books, including the Washington Post Garden Book and Chanticleer, a Pleasure Garden.

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(Linda Davidson/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Head gardener John Sonnier at the double-bin compost area. Each year, the four-acre garden generates 30 cubic yards of compost, which is returned to the soil.

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The thrush might find the salamander just small enough to eat, but that wasn’t the most obvious link between them. Both creatures are drawn to a garden where pesticides and fertilizers are little used, especially synthetic ones.

The songbird could rustle around for grubs and worms spared insecticide sprays; the moist-skinned amphibian could slither through a lawn free of fertilizer salts or fungicides. These vertebrates are the obvious signs of a healthy garden, but the organic gardener knows too that the soil is rich in decaying matter and teeming with life. This biosphere is microbial and cannot be seen easily, but it can be felt. This is the joyful aspect of organic gardening that goes beyond the science. It just feels good to be the steward of healthy natural systems that, in turn, nourish our plants.

Another gardener feeling the love these days is John Sonnier, the horticulturist at the four-acre greenhouse, gardens and grounds of the British ambassador’s residence on Embassy Row.

With the blessing of its current occupants, Ambassador Nigel Sheinwald and Lady Julia Sheinwald, Sonnier has initiated an aggressive organic regime in a landscape with features notoriously dependent on chemical help, including a sweeping lawn, a formal rose garden and a greenhouse stuffed with orchids. In the garden’s ecological guise, there are echoes here of Prince Charles’s impressive organic and holistic approach to gardening at Highgrove, which I have seen and admire.

In rebuilding the greenhouse range, Sonnier and his colleagues have installed a sub-patio cistern that stores up to 1,700 gallons of rainwater used to water plants. Spared the chemicals in tap water, plants have responded with “a huge growth spurt,” he said.

Solar tubes on the greenhouse roof heat the water. Inside, the orchid collection and other tender plants receive individual attention by gardeners and volunteers, who check them for such pests as scale, thrips and aphids. The insects are destroyed by hand, using soap or alcohol.

Viruses tend to spread in old, large orchid collections, but all the diseased plants were culled and new ones get the quarantine treatment.

Outside, the large, formal rose garden terraces are full of beds of hybrid teas, the classic roses for cutting but also the fussiest. Sonnier said the great architect Edwin Lutyens, who designed the neoclassical mansion, did the gardeners a favor by laying out the rose garden in an open, sunny location where the roses get good air circulation. This significantly reduces blackspot problems. Other maladies are addressed as or before they emerge. With approximately 400 rosebushes, it’s an approach that requires constant attention.