ENTERTAINMENT PLANT ING OUR GARDENS
I consider myself an adventurous gardener, obsessed with unusual foliage, rare species or anything from a specialist nursery and I am also impulsive! If it is exotic looking and hardy of course I want it, and not so hardy…well it is worth having a go with it, over- wintering it in the already crowded greenhouse, isn’t it? I also collect plants, why have one type of euphorbia when you can have six, after all you can never have too many…right? We all have our vices, for some it’s shoes, handbags or watches, for me it is plants.
So how does a plant obsessive create their garden without it looking like a jumbled mish-mash of odd or unusual plants? Well, I am also a planner. Three years ago, I realised I had fallen out of love with my garden and had a vision to create a lush, verdant, slightly exotic, encompassing space. And so, I started to buy plants that fitted the image in my mind’s eye, although it would be another twelve months until I designed it.
When the time finally came to plant up the garden, I had a large collection of plants that I had being buying combined with plants that I had lifted and divided and saved from the old garden scheme, which all worked with the vision in my head.
The key to any cohesive planting design is repetition and rhythm. I have palms, ferns and tree ferns for my architectural structure, different species, but their similar leaf shapes repeat. My euphorbias, although all different, have a similar form through the borders. Large format leaves of fatsias and tetrapanex add drama, and the understory is planted with groups of heucheras, hostas and carex, tying the scheme together.
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Colour also helps create a rhythm in the garden bouncing the eye around it. In my predominantly lush green garden, I have used contrasting deep purply black leafed Phormium Platts’ Black and Ligularia Britt Marie Crawford, along with the dark trunks of the tree ferns, combined with the chartreuse yellow leaves of Carex oshimensis ‘Everillo’ and Heuchera ‘Guacamole’ to bring balance to the scheme as a whole.
Here are my top tips for successful planting AUGUST 2021 - THINGS TO DO:
New Moon - August 8th 2:50pm Full Moon - August 22nd 1:02pm
Keep on top of the watering, in dry weather pots will need watering daily. Take cuttings of tender plants, so you have plants for next year
PLANT OF THE MONTH – DAHLIAS
After going out of fashion, dahlias are back. In every shape, colour and form, whether single flower, cactus, pompom or waterlily style flowers. Lift and store in a cool dry place over winter.
Dahlia Total Tangerine I have grown this dahlia for several years now, a single flower that the bees love, it is the first to shoot, fastest growing, slug and snail resistant and prolific flowerer. If you have never grown a dahlia this is a good one to start with.
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• Have a vision or plan in your mind on what you want to achieve, don’t buy haphazardly
• Consider how the plants will perform through the seasons •
• Buy in multiples for perennials if you can afford it
• If you can only afford one of each perennial, have a go at propagating, with a quick google you will know if you can divide a plant bought from the garden centre and end up with three or four from the one you bough
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Take cuttings, I buy the best specimen for cutting material and take as many cuttings from it as I can, quickly multiplying the number of plants I have, for next to no cost.
• Be patient, Rome wasn’t built in a day!
Buy as large as you can afford for trees and shrubs that are slow growing
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