Garden of the Week
This garden in the suburbs of Sheffield is packed with a host of colourful plants that provide evolving, year-round interest
You won’t find drifts of planting in Christine Littlewood’s garden. “If you plant in drifts, that one plant dies altogether, leaving a big gap,” she explains. Instead you’ll discover more than 1,200 plant varieties cleverly partnered to provide constantly-evolving impact.
“I mix and match, putting different plants together so one takes over from another, giving a continued season of interest and an ever-changing display,” Christine says.
The year-round colour scheme starts with snowdrops and other early spring bulbs, followed by daffodils and tulips before hordes of perennials take over, quickly masking their untidy, dying foliage. Grasses come to the fore and a fine display of autumn foliage colours emerge just as the summer flowers are finishing. Finally, the branches of trees and shrubs provide structural interest coated with winter frost and snow.
When Christine and her husband Keith moved into their house and started clearing the plot, they found it was a former Dig for Victory garden “with rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb and couch grass galore!”. They stripped out everything apart from a 90-year-old ‘Bramley’s Seedling’ apple tree and some double peonies.
It had been separated into sections, which they decided to keep, but they levelled the different areas to obscure the garden’s slope. “There are just one or two slight steps between them,” she says.
Because the garden is 90m (600ft) above sea level, the couple installed fences to provide privacy, protection and a place for climbers, and then
work began on planting up
the individual sections. They wanted each to contain a tree or shrub, but could only buy plants that fitted into their car.
However, their careful plant choices have matured into beautiful specimens, including a magnificent 12m (40ft) tall metasequoia, stately Ginkgo
biloba and pittosporum trees, and elegant shrubs such as pink-flowered indigofera, enkianthus with its clusters of dainty, bell-like flowers and aucubas for their striking leaves.
When it came to filling the beds with flowering bulbs and colourful perennials, Christine certainly didn’t stint on her displays. “I placed tall-growing foxgloves, delphiniums, hollyhocks, helianthus, thalictrum and rudbeckia at the back of my borders or in the
middle of island beds,” she says.
Then she squeezed in plants that she loved – alliums, Oriental poppies, dieramas, campanulas, hardy geraniums and clematis, to name but a few. For real favourites Christine “finds it hard to stop” and she now has more than 50 varieties of hardy geraniums, 30 different clematis and 20 crocosmias!
Christine’s garden is sunny and south-facing, but the shade cast by the metasequoia enabled her to create a fernery. Greens also play an important part as a foil for all the vibrant colours. “I love the different leaf shapes and beauty of the mass of varying shades of green,” Christine says.
She started opening her garden for the NGS 12 years ago, and has so many plants that weeding simply isn’t a problem. “I do spend a lot of time dividing