A MASTERCLASS IN PLANTING FOR SPRING
Expert advice on getting the very best from your garden at this time of year
With a lifetime’s experience of working with plants, including 31 years in joint charge at Sissinghurst, Sibylle Kreutzberger is perfectly placed to offer advice on getting the best from your garden at this time of year
Every spring, Sibylle Kreutzberger’s garden in the village of Condicote, near Stow-on-the-wold in Gloucestershire, is full of promise. Come high summer, the beds will be burgeoning with colour and there will be hardly an inch of bare soil to be seen, but for now there is time to savour individual details: the singular charms of Narcissus ‘Jenny’ with its windswept petals or the elegant flowers of erythroniums, dotted through with snake’s head fritillaries. The effect has been carefully composed, each flower and leaf type selected for the contribution it can make to the whole.
Sibylle is an expert at multi-layering, making the most of any piece of ground with successional planting that gradually evolves and gives colour and interest over a long period – something most gardeners yearn to achieve. She and her lifelong friend and colleague Pam Schwerdt, who died in 2009, bought The Garden House in 1991, after retiring as joint head gardeners at Sissinghurst – a position preceded by rigorous training at Miss Havergal’s School of Horticulture for women at Waterperry, near Oxford. In its third-of-an-acre garden, the planting skills they honed during their Sissinghurst years have been applied on a much more domestic scale.
Sibylle describes the garden as being “like a misshapen amoeba, very narrow by the house and fanning out further down. Its design was worked out on the ground first, then transferred onto a paper plan by Pam.” When they moved here, the soil was thin and unpromising. “The soil in this area is Cotswold brash – stony and alkaline with a ph of 8.5,” she says. “We increased the depth by importing soil from a local farmer and then added to it year after year with mulch created from our own compost made from garden waste, plus straw and farmyard manure. The soil is now much better and deeper as a result.” To further improve its condition, everything is fed once a year with rose fertiliser, which is high in potash and low in nitrogen, with high magnesium and iron.
When you don’t have acres to play with, every plant needs to justify its place but, as Sibylle points out, it is perfectly possible to position more than one in each space: “Things grow on top of each other and many will come up through other plants very happily. Some die down fairly soon after flowering and, as one thing recedes, another will come up to cover its dying foliage.”
Sibylle recommends choosing long-lasting foliage plants such as epimediums and irises for the fronts of borders to hold the garden together: “Foliage is very important, so make every choice count. Something like Veratrum nigrum looks spectacular as its leaves unfurl. Choose a
mixture of rounds, spikes and fluffies for contrast.” Full use can be made of the back of the borders in spring, too, because even small things such as snowdrops, crocuses and wood anemones can be clearly seen and appreciated while everything else is low.
Certain plants can be very useful for knitting a space together. Once happy and established, a plant like Corydalis ‘Beth Evans’ will romp away and mingle well with woodland plants such as hellebores, providing good ground cover in spring with its fine, lacy leaves. Ferns are useful for the same reason. Sibylle grows an exquisite maidenhair fern, Adiantum pedatum, whose leaves emerge bronze and gradually change to a long-lasting carpet of green. Fritillaries grow up through it but Sibylle does point out that multi-layering doesn’t work for everything: she also tried growing a little yellow tulip through the fern and although the flowers did well in their first year, they never reappeared, so may have found it overwhelming.
“When you find two or three plants that you think will look good flowering together, there is a temptation to put them right next door to each other,” Sibylle says, “but when they go over, that will leave you with a larger redundant area waiting to be filled. Instead, space them out. The eye will actually join them together visually anyway and read them as a whole. Also, each
“Foliage is very important, so make every plant choice count”
plant will be less noticeable when it fades if it has others around it to take over the flowering.
“Every gardener has a different approach – mine is that I like to paint a picture,” she continues. “In some ways I am a bit of a control freak but, at the same time, I do like plants to be themselves. What interests me is the effect you can create by juxtaposing one plant with another.”
Sibylle is moving on from The Garden House now but she enjoys encouraging others to try new things in their own plots. She and Pam were always past masters at knowing which plants would work well together and often gave talks on the subject to gardening clubs and societies: “Audience members would want us to recommend ‘ideal’ planting combinations they could slavishly copy but we always refused to be drawn. Have fun experimenting! Invent your own. That is much more satisfying.”
“Every gardener has a different approach – mine is that I like to paint a picture”