Garden Centre

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Colour in the April Garden

April, May and June are the months when British gardens often look their best. March is a bit variable (ie gardens are often under snow or invisible through driving rain) and July is frequently too parched for a really good display of garden-wide flowers: Cosmos, Cape Daisies and sunflowers will be looking great but a lot of the border will be tired and showing its age, and lawns can be a bit bald, so these twelve weeks or so are the real glories of the British gardening summer.

One of the things that often disappoints me is how little use some gardeners make of the colour range available to them at this time of year. Once the snowdrops and crocus have gone over, and the camellias are fading, many gardeners seem to have nothing much to show for their labours until the roses flourish in late May and June. This is such a waste! In a clement climate (that’s posh speak for damp and cool) you can have colour every week of the year and when there are long hours of sunshine without too much heat, that colour can be really glowing, varied and sustained.

One of my favourite spring displays is this bank of lungwort (Pulmonaria) set against the variegated Euonymus behind it. The daffodil is a bit of a bonus – it’s usually gone over before the lungwort is at its best, but this year the double daffs came a few days later than usual and gave an added zing to the planting scheme. See how honest I am? I could have pretended I planned that …

Anyway, this kind of planting, where you use a stable year round colour (the cream and green of the Euonymus) to offset a range of short-lived contrasts is a really good way to get your garden performing well. Later in the year, the Crocosmia, which is to the left of the lungwort, will come into flower and its fiery orange display will work just as well with the cream and green as a backdrop. Neither flowering plant would have nearly so much impact against a plain green background. But if I’d planted red hot pokers (Kniphofia) instead of Crocosmia, it wouldn’t have worked so well, because their red, orange and yellow combination would have been too much of a scatter of colour – solid blocks of colour work better with variegated plants.

Labels: euonymus, garden borders, lungwort, spring colour, spring garden

The All Seasons Gardener at 12:41 AM 0 Comments

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