Spring BLOOMS

Celebrate the new season by bringing a carnival of natural colour to your green spaces, with spectacular planting ideas from Gina Price’s gorgeous Oxfordshire garden

Spring is definitely in the air – you can sense it everywhere. In our gardens, the new season is like an inflating balloon that we know will soon burst and we will be spattered with sunshine and flowers.

If you want to truly appreciate this phenomenon, then there are few places better to go than Pettifers in Oxfordshire. The house, owned by Gina and John Price, is mellow stone and the garden is sublime.

The couple came here about a quarter of a century ago – they were not gardeners but were full of enthusiasm and excitement. The house fronts onto a village road but the back garden rolls elegantly away into open countryside. Gina remembers “walking through this place and thinking ‘I can make something of this’, in spite of the fact that I knew nothing at all”.

That initial naivety has been replaced not only by a wonderful sense of design and plantsmanship, but also an eye for the unusual. Like many of the best instinctive gardeners she picked it up as she went along, helped by friends who gave advice, in particular Diany Binney (then chatelaine of Kiftsgate Court in Gloucestershire), who visited twice a year in the early days.

“Diany did not hold back with her opinions. She stood by one border and pronounced: ‘What a damn dull border: just a lot of aquilegias, and not even special ones!’ It was quite upsetting, but

she was usually right.”

As well as enduring the scathing honesty of her friends, Gina visited a lot of other gardens looking for inspiration and ideas. She is happy to point out little homages, such as the diamond-shaped path, which mirrors that at York Gate (near Leeds, now owned by gardening charity Perennial) and the small walkways through the borders that were inspired by Margery Fish, whose garden at East Lambrook Manor in Somerset is still open to the public.

NORTHERN EXPOSURE

The garden at Pettifers faces north, which many would consider a disadvantage, but in the eyes of a “glass half-full” kind of gardener, it can be seen as an opportunity to grow a whole new range of plants.

“When we arrived, this garden was mostly one big lawn with three big yews, a couple of narrow borders and soil that was truly appalling,” explains Gina. Things have changed since then, as years of regular mulching has transformed the soil and the borders are now generously proportioned and stuffed with well-chosen plants.

As you move down the slope, more wonders are revealed. One lawn is studded with so many crocuses that it is tricky to find somewhere to tread without crushing something. These will be succeeded by narcissi and snake’s head fritillaries.

Next are the four yews that have become this garden’s trademark – they are clipped into a unique, informal formality (if you know what I mean): part bottle, part blastfurnace, part elephant’s trunk. “We started this part of the garden about 15 years ago: the yews were left over from a hedge so are a sort of serendipitous afterthought.”

Any garden, no matter how clever the design, will revert to a muddle of weeds and overgrown shrubs in a very short time if it

is not looked after. There is no danger of this happening: it is constantly cosseted not only by Gina but also by the brilliant Polly Stevens, Pettifers’ full-time gardener.

Together they lavish the garden with a sort of tough love – plants are coaxed and encouraged but if something does not work properly, then there is no place for sentimentality. Gina has the courage to rip out imperfections and start again. The result of this determination and conviction is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon – no matter what the season.

James Alexander-Sinclair is a garden designer based in Oxfordshire. He writes for Gardens Illustrated and BBC Gardener’s World Magazine, and is also a member of the Royal Horticultural Society Council.

The spring sunshine gives a glorious glow to beds bejewelled with lime-green Euphorbia palustris and bronze-orange Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fern Cottage’.

11 The statuesque, bottle-shaped yews in the parterre tower over naturalised massing of different narcissi, nudging into a jewelled scattering of snake’s head fritillaries (Fritillaria meleagris) in the grass. As the bulbs fade, the surrounding borders spring into life for the rest of the summer. 2 When late spring is on the verge of early summer, the tennis-ball sized spherical magenta flowers of Allium ‘Purple Sensation’ rise through the foliage of later plants and echo the deep purple blooms of tulip ‘Curly Sue’. This sort of colour-repetition is aways effective in borders, as it carries the eye into the furthest corners.

3 3 Two sorts of euphorbia glint in the sunrise: at the back, the livid green marsh spurge, Euphorbia palustris, and in front, the striking orange Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fern Cottage’. Both are fabulous spring-foliage plants guaranteed to give zip and pep to any border. 4 This is an amazing sight to greet a early riser: a glowing tapestry of spring plants from epimediums and dicentras to the foliage and flowers of hellebores. Lots of contrast culminates in that lovely tiered wedding cake tree, Cornus controversa ‘Variegata’.

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BELOW Gina Price took on the task of transforming Pettifers despite little technical knowledge. Support from gardening mentors and a willingness to experiment has led to today’s spectacular result

6 5 A drift of daffodils bloom beneath a wedding cake tree. In spring the plants are still slightly separated – it’s too early for the full-blown entanglement of summer. The emerging leaves of trees and later perennials add a lettucecoloured freshness to the garden. 6 Diamonds of granite setts are a distinctive feature of the garden at York Gate near Leeds. They work just as well here as you walk from the house through deep red ‘Black Parrot’ tulips, which go beautifully with the drystone walls.

77 Later in the season, this bed is full of the peonies which Gina has collected, but even now it does not disappoint, with a magnificent display of hellebores. These happily hybridise with each other, so one is never quite sure what colour flower a seedling will produce.