Garden Centre

Friday, April 9, 2010

Border rethink and bed review

Well, I said I’d have to think it out again and having met the most marvellous seed swapper this week, I’ve really been forced to think about what I’m going to do with my eyesore beds. It’s not that the idea of herbs used to create cosmetics was a bad one … more that I came home with about forty packets of seeds that aren’t of that nature, all of which I want to find a home for.

So … here’s the new idea. A red, black and white bed. Well, two beds really, as the set up is a raised bed above a ground level one. As seed I’ve got:

• Bright red Montbretia – obviously that’s a longer than usual job to grow from seed, but if it’s a true pillarbox red it would be worth it, I think.
• Variegated Honesty – that’s variegated leaves and white flowers.
• Cosmos Versailles Tetra a red/burgundy annual
• Bronze fennel
• Dwarf sunflowers
• Giant red millet and tasselled black millet
• Black cornflowers.

And already in the garden I have:

• Snowdrops and white hellebores
• Black hellebores
• Ophiopogon Planiscapus Nigrescens (aka black grass).


Now clearly I’d need some more reds and quite a few more perennials but it sounds rather exciting I think. Anybody else got any ideas what I should add?

Labels: coloured borders, garden design, montbretia, south facing beds

The All Seasons Gardener at 8:50 AM 2 Comments

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Monday, September 3, 2007

Never act (or garden) with children or animals ...

I’m about to be visited by a young person – an extremely young person. Sort of between the sitting down and dribbling stage and the stomping around and eating worms stage, which made me think about setting up a special area for him, while he’s here.

Children are often happier having their own area of a patio garden because otherwise you end up yelling at them every minute of the day, either to stay away from things you think are precious or to stay away from things that are dangerous to the, like poisonous berries, ponds, and so on.

Forward panning helps!. A sand pit, water area, swing or Wendy house can be planned, to give them a sense of a secret adventure place of their own, but remember that any water feature – whether specifically designed for them or for adult use – should be visible from the house and/or securely netted to avoid a child falling in. Remember, anybody can drown in five inches of water, drunken visiting rugby players (you know who you are!) take note. Wendy houses can be hideously expensive, but this lovely log cabin is a standard shed, cunningly adapted by a gifted dad!

Your garden may be so small that you feel this kind of planning isn’t possible, but usually imaginative solutions can be found. A pergola planted with pretty annual climbers can also be the home of a child’s swing, as long as the wood of the pergola is strong enough and is securely set into concrete foundations.

A collapsible paddling pool can be set up on any area of grass or paving and stored out of sight when not in use – and happy little waterers can be encouraged to use the pool to water thirsty plants, saving you a job!

Labels: garden design, garden planning, garden ponds, garden shed

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:28 AM 0 Comments

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Saturday, September 1, 2007

What is the point?

I know that local councils are being encouraged to ‘green’ their city spaces both literally and figuratively, and I’m all in favour of getting as much natural beauty into people’s everyday lives as possible, but what’s the value of this?

To begin with, the plants are only visible if (a) you know they are there - because they are twenty-five feet up on the side of a building and (b) you crane your neck while standing on the pavement outside a busy multi-storey car park that is fronted by a taxi rank – something of a recipe for curses, if not for actually being hit by a mad taxi driver or maddened car park user.

Second, these plants might not have much visual utility, but they could have been a wonderful environmental resource as bee and insect attractors, or pollution sinks. But they are neither – they aren’t the right species to meet either of those criteria.

And third, they are in such awful shape: desiccated, straggly and ugly, that any good they might have done is completed negated by their appalling condition.

What a waste of an opportunity.

Labels: garden design, urban plants

The All Seasons Gardener at 9:28 AM 0 Comments

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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Gardens in the News ...

But not for very much longer ... recent ICM Poll, commissioned by Natural England, discovered that 45% of 18-34 year olds do not feel they are well informed about wildlife gardening and 37% of 18-24 year olds said they would like to do more but don’t know how. So The UK’s leading wildlife and horticultural organisations have joined Natural England to create and sign a wildlife gardening manifesto to save the nation’s gardens, particularly those in towns and cities. It is claimed that in London, front gardens with an area 22 times the size of Hyde Park are now paved over and lost, reducing havens for wildlife, increasing the impact of flash flooding and contributing to climate change, so it's not just a problem for wildlife, it's a problem that ruins our houses and pushes up all our insurance premiums.

However, apart from the benefit to our own health and wallets and the survival of declining species, such as hedgehogs, frogs and bumblebees, that live on our doorsteps, this manifesto is a good thing because if only people gave up creating sad little vistas like the one above, which is fit only to be a cat toilet, and got on with growing simple native plants, the country would look better too!

Labels: garden design, garden makeovers, garden wildlife, natural england

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:47 PM 0 Comments

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Friday, July 13, 2007

Garden Designs, the good the bad and the ugly …

This garden has a real air of 1970s design. It brings to mind the era of The Rockford Files and The Partridge Family, Caramac bars and Click-Clacks (which you may have known as Bangers, Bonkers, Clackers, Crackers, Gnip-Gnops, Klick-Klacks, K-Nokkers, Popper Knockers, Quick Clacks, Rockers, Super Clackers, Tikka Takkas, Whackers or Zonkers!). Something about this design is redolent of those tan-coloured leather jackets with waists that TV detectives always wore, and luxurious sideburns.

If you think I’m being sarcastic, think again. The seventies didn’t give us much to be proud of in design stakes, but some of the seventies gardens have more than stood the test of time and one theme of that era, the year-round garden, has become a classic. The absolute apex of this garden style is Foggy Bottom in Norfolk, started by Adrian Bloom in the early seventies, as part of the Bressingham Garden complex which was created by his father Alan in the 1940s. The garden at Foggy Bottom is famous for all-year round colour and interest using heathers and conifers and is regularly featured on TV and in magazines. A superb book containing much of Adrian’s work, called ‘Winter Garden Glory’ shows how this kind of garden can be both low maintenance and spectacular in appearance. In addition, a craze of the current decade is foreshadowed in these seventies designs; there’s an air of the Zen garden in those mounded shapes of greenery and the contrast between warm coloured paths and soothing foliage, without the distraction of flowers.

Although this garden could do with a bit of a tidy up, perhaps - and some pruning to bring the growth back to the lower levels of those heathers - the colours and textures contained in it are excellent, the maintenance would be minimal for the gardener and the initial investment in plants, made perhaps three decades ago, has repaid the gardener with substantial plants that have stood the test of time.

Labels: all-year gardening, garden design, seventies gardening, zen garden

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:19 AM 0 Comments

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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Gardens open to the Public – St Catherine’s Hospice at Hurstpierpoint

It’s a sad fact that my idea of a great time is to poke around other people’s gardens! Of course if you do that without permission you end up explaining yourself to the local constabulary but once or more a year, many long-suffering, green-fingered, generous-minded folk feed my addiction to other peoples’ herbaceous borders by opening their gardens to the public.

On Sunday, braving the rain and almost gale force winds, 'himself' and I set out for a tour of Hurstpierpoint, a village not too far from us, but which we’d only ever driven through. And what a difference we found to our rather unwelcome afternoon in Worthing recently! The open day combined allotments and private gardens, and we were enthusiastically greeted in every place we visited, given tons of information (one kind gentleman even went and looked up a plant name for me, in The Plantsman – greater love hath no gardener for his garden than to lay down his copy of Plantsman in the rain for a stranger!), purchased an excellent tea ('himself' had fruit cake and I had a fresh cream meringue), and bought some unusual and high quality plants which I’ll describe in detail later.

Partly because of the weather, which was vile, but partly because I’m a nosy soul and take twice as long to get around as anybody else, we only managed to visit a few of the gardens that were open, so we’ll have to go back next year. And over the next few weeks I’ll be exploring each one in greater depth. The photograph shows the last of the four gardens we visited – what I’d call a true plantsman’s garden. It’s a small rear garden, and the notable features are the intelligent and imaginative plantings that combine texture, colour and structure to give the eye a complex, but perhaps not restful, experience. To offset the drama of the plants, all the garden structures have been painted a matte green – you can just see one of the five seating areas in this small garden at the back of the photo, a gazebo with a fold up table and chairs – and have been placed in different areas of the garden, each with a clear focal point. You can see the carex grasses at the front of the photograph which soften the edges of the path, and make a nice foil to the orange and red shades of kniphofia behind, which are in turn offset by small-leaved shrubs that allow the sword-shaped foliage of the kniphofia to contribute to interest in the garden, even after the flowers have gone over.

What’s most impressive about this garden, apart from the obvious care and attention needed to maintain it, is the way each plant’s location contributes to the overall plan, rather than being a specimen plant that draws the eye and forces its neighbours into the background.

Should you have the chance to visit the ‘Secret Gardens of Hurstpierpoint’ and explore them for yourself, I can’t recommend it too highly – until then, you’ll have to wait for me to dribble out the information over the next few weeks!

Labels: charity gardens, garden design, garden secrets, garden visits, Secret Gardens of Hurstpierpoint

The All Seasons Gardener at 11:44 PM 2 Comments

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Saturday, June 9, 2007

Garden Designs; the good the bad and the ugly

As I travel, I often come across imaginative gardens, or, alternatively, throwbacks to a previous age. It’s quite astonishing how easily one can date a garden by the plants in it and the layout. Decking, for example, will mark the first decade of the new millennium, while the big 1950s trademark was the conservatory. The swinging sixties didn’t just bring free love and mini-skirts, they were also the zenith of the raised rock garden (if you walk into a garden when the flowerbeds rise to about waist height and are studded with granite, you can bet that garden was built in the 1960s. So, in the interest of good garden design, I’ve been clicking away at the gardens I pass to bring you some of the nicest, nastiest and most thought provoking.

Here’s my first find – a garden just down the road from me. It’s an interesting take on the classic formal garden, remodelled for the tiny suburban frontage. The standard box hedges have been laid out in a formal design and there are two classic trees, cut to spheres – a feature that normally flanks a doorway – here nearly adjusted to flank a bay window. There’s an ivy mound in the centre of the formal knot garden; ivy mounds are common in grottoes and wildernesses but not usually seen in formal spaces, and the urn, which in a stately home would have the coat of arms (known as the armorial bearings) of the aristocratic family, and would normally contain a cascading plant, is here housing a nice spiky succulent which offers a good contrasting shape and texture to the dense rather fidgety leaves that make up the rest of the display.

It’s a really imaginative and well planned space – the maintenance will be quite time consuming, but perhaps not much more so than in a front garden with grass and a flower border – I would imagine that the people who live here are used to people stopping and admiring their frontage, because formal gardens always attract attention, so this is not a style to adopt if you don’t want folk hovering outside your house. On the other hand, this is certainly an all year round winner, because formal gardens in winter are spectacularly lovely, especially when coated in snow.

Labels: formal garden, garden design, garden makeovers, garden tips

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:45 AM 0 Comments

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