What’s coming up in the garden this week. By Louisa Bell of City and Country Gardens
Design and construction
On the level
Buying a house is a huge decision, undertaken after a ten minute visit with a biased estate agent. As you walk around looking at the views, you are mentally making mortgage calculations in your head. Can we afford it, could we live with this carpet for now? People start off with a fixed list – “ We must have four bedrooms and detached” – and then fall in love with a three bedroomed semi. One thing that isn’t usually a compromise is the garden. If somebody wants a garden, they’ll rarely buy a property without that outdoor space.
People’s attitudes to their gardens fascinate me. To some it’s a complete priority to get the garden done. They’ve thought it through. They already know that we will probably need a digger, dumper and space to drag through unwanted trees. They also know that this will make a mess. Access can be critical if levels need changing. We will often be able to change levels within a landscape without removing soil from site. This is the ‘cut and fill’ option. However, we still need a digger to move the soil around. If we need to reduce levels drastically, the soil needs to be removed, and this needs a digger and dumper.
Access is needed for skips and grab and tip lorries and the driveway is often commandeered for a couple of weeks. Once the main clearance has happened, life can return to some normality. After that, its men moving soil around and then the infrastructure of walls and paths can go in place.
Even a garden that seems very flat to the eye will have level issues. It’s imperative that drives, paths and patios all drain away from the house and have the correct ‘falls’. If the doors at the back of the house are lower than the garden, the earth will have to move!
We are working on five sites this week, which is keeping us busy! Three are hugely sloped and two are flat. The two flat ones are the more difficult ones, from a level point of view and will be the ones where the most soil is actually taken off site. The smallest, flattest one has a kitchen door that’s a good foot below the rest of the garden. Therefore the rest of the garden has to go down over a foot and lead away from the door.
Our most sloping site – 8 metre drops from top to bottom, and a metre from side to side – is a much more straightforward job of cut and fill, but going from this to this (see pictures below) needs forward thinking by a client.
Plants
Block mentality
The planted garden lets everyone down at this time of the year. A garden without design is a miserable thing in December. The lawn could have had another cut, but it was too wet and now it’s covered in leaves. The borders are full of brown, rotting plants that the frost has finally permeated and killed off. A few apples hang disconsolately from their branch and the last couple of leaves hang on trees like survivors of a ship wreck, just waiting for the next wave of wind to finish them off. Of course, the designed garden is still a thing of beauty, but I would say that, wouldn’t I! The infrastructure holds it all together.
The paths, patios, pergolas, walkways, lighting, water features. They all look just as good now as they did in the summer, and the designer’s planting is so different from a gardener’s plants. We’re not scared to plant in blocks of shape, colour and texture. You’ll never go and put seven of the same plant into your trolley at the garden centre, but we will! The garden will have form right through the winter, and even though things are dying off, there is still enough shape and structure to hold the garden together through these next few weeks, until the lovely bulbs start poking through. A joyful time!
Your plant of the week should really be the group that looks best, not the individual. One sedum will look miserable now, but nine will look fabulous. One clump of grass will have started to bend over, but a whole swathe of grasses will look magnificent in the frost. Even roses that are pruned into shape will add something to the picture. Little joys of plants will punctuate the garden throughout December and I am hoping to have a New year’s day count of flowers, but right now it’s blocks and sweeps of plants that keep it all together. Remember, always buy in groups and never less than three!
Things to do
Smile at the sink
In the winter garden, there are still little pots of plants that will struggle along and flower bravely. My Mum always has pots of lovely little flowers in her house or on the step just outside her French doors. She brings them into the warmth, and they decide to blossom like mad. Yesterday, she had the most beautiful old terracotta pot of violas.
Once they’re finished, she pops them back into a sheltered spot to recover, and brings in something else. I will start buying bulbs every week now. The nursery has hyacinths in bud, and pots of narcissi. Put an old table outside – buy one from a junk shop and paint it – right near the window where you can see it from the kitchen sink or the sitting room doors. Buy five or seven lovely pots of different sizes, or find old terracotta pots, and pop in a selection of plants from the nursery. Use bulbs in a couple, ivy in another and flowering pansies. Group them on the table and I promise they will give you such pleasure through the coming weeks. As Christmas approaches, add baubles and ribbons and string little fairy lights through them. Just one small table for mankind and something lovely to look at, as you stand at the sink.
For all the things in your garden, talk to us!
City and Country Gardens
01273 202115 / 01903 892285
www.city-gardens.net
