How does your bedding grow?
Push the boat out and go for broke this year with your displays!
If you want to get more of that ‘spring’s busting out all over’ feeling, there are plenty of pot-grown bulbs and bedding on the sales benches now, but do we go all out and pack in all the colours, or restrict the rainbow and add subtle shades of foliage? Here are three spring and three summer ideas and pictures to get you thinking about how to create your displays.
On your bike
The old police bike, picturedp below left, didn’t come with the wicker basket. I added it to showcase a fabulous selection of daffs, anemones and pansies. Mixed colours add to the rustic charm and it can be wheeled right up to the front door or window. Vintage bikes can often be bought at car boot sales.
Blend leaves and flowers
If you’ve never grown the yellow-leaved rush, Luzula sylvatica ‘Aurea’, you’ve missed out on a treat. Greeny-yellow in the summer, it’s in winter and spring that it peaks. It looks great in the winter garden at Anglesey Abbey, near Cambridge, with snowdrops, but is good enough to include in containers, too. Try it with a pansy with yellow in the petals. Brown-leaved sedges also perfectly partner orange pansies or try cool off pink primroses with an edging of grey-leaved heucheras.
Out to grass
Blue and yellow provide us with the very essence of spring, and one of the most romantic ways to combine them is by underplanting your
daffodils with blue windflowers, Anemone blanda. It works in grass, pots or borders, but avoid the giant daffodils or the anemone will be dwarfed and likely buried by collapsed foliage and flowers after wind and rain. They’ll soon spread their seed and turn clumps into drifts.
Mini petunias
There’s no doubt that great improvements have been made to calibrachoas in recent years. They’re more compact, free-flowering, robust
and the colour range is mouth-watering. They need little in the way of company to succeed, no deadheading and will flower for as long as autumn frosts allow. My favourites are the ones with a ring of contrasting colour in the throat. Look out for young plants now to grow on.
Group for colour
Often a limited range of colours will be more subtle and easier on the eye. Many cult gardens have built their reputation by restricting the rainbow and it works on any scale. I set up a red and pink theme outside the barn last summer using a backbone of heuchera and coleus foliage with flowers
from fuchsia ‘Thalia’, compact chocolate Cosmos atrosanguineus ‘Chocamocha’ and pelargonium ‘Frank Headley’.
Caddied away
Those cheap plastic caddies that are ideal for the kids’ pencils or your tools also make fine planters if you drill holes in the base. Do this from above on an old wooden surface or the plastic may shatter unsupported. I kept it simple and used just a couple of striped petunia
‘Phantom’ in a zingy yellow tub.