Dressing up your garden
AGARDEN is like a wardrobe. Every so often it pays to review its contents and re-evaluate your personal style, fit and colour scheme – or at least that is what Mrs T tells me when she is trying to separate me from my old gardening fleece and comfy jeans.
Plants don’t wear out, of course, but they have been known to shrink unexpectedly or disappear without trace. Some of them are overtaken by middle-age spread, while others go out of fashion or you simply lose interest in them.
So while this year’s summer spectacle is still fresh in your mind, take a moment to decide how you might improve, upgrade or fine-tune your garden.
The thing you notice most as a garden matures is the encroaching shade.As trees and shrubs grow up and thicken, once-sunny areas gradually turn to dappled shade and underlying perennials are slowly shaded out.Those species that find the new conditions least to their liking soon cease flowering, weaken and fade away, while others that can still cope spread out, thus altering the balance of your planting scheme.
THE SOLUTION is simple – thin out the shrubs to let in more light, weed out perennials that have reached nuisance proportions and plant more shade lovers in the gaps.A lot of very good plants are happiest in the sort of dappled shade you find when a garden starts growing up. Hardy cranesbills, hellebores and heucheras are still fashionable and together make stylish tapestrystyle ground cover that looks good with shrubs or taller perennials.
The other big problem in maturing gardens is diminishing space – here the answer is to grow climbers. Lift an existing border by putting an obelisk near the back for climbers or put in a row of posts linked by swags of rope along a path to make a colonnade.
There are all sorts of climbers you can grow up through trees and shrubs, which effectively doubles or trebles your planting space. But the best are clematis, which make so little leaf they don’t overshadow their host. Instead they just pop out the top and fill the gaps with flowers.
If you already have climbers such as roses or honeysuckle growing on an arch, pergola, gazebo or trellis structures, you can assume there’s room for a clematis, too. But it’s no good trying to shoehorn a clematis into a space at the very base of your tree or shrub where the soil is already full of roots or at the foot of the structure where the ground is full of builders’ rubble.
The trick is to prepare a planting hole 18in from a structure with foundations, then work in wellrotted compost so it is good and rich.To grow a climber up through a tree or shrub, plant it at the edge of the canopy, not in deep shade underneath, then prop a pole from your plant into the branches for it to grow along.
There are all sorts of things you can do to subtly alter your garden. If you want to pump up the volume of a flower bed, go for grasses. Choose ones for their feathery seed heads or colourful foliage in red, purple, blue or striped, or there are evergreens for year-round effect.They are ideal for slotting between perennial flowers to break up colours.
If the garden seems short of colour, you have several options. For spring the answer is bulbs – plant them over the next four to six weeks for flowering next year. For summer, it has to be roses. Choose repeat-flowering varieties, and plant them in the autumn. For containers, it has to be summer bedding and patio plants.
So get organised now and you’ll face a brighter outlook next year.