Carol Klein on making the most of vertical space and she answers your questions
Tiny garden? No matter – plant upwards for colour and interest!
It’s easy to neglect one aspect of our gardens. So intent are we on concentrating on what’s below us – beds and borders, annuals, perennials and shrubs – that it’s easy to forget that there’s another dimension we can exploit: planting upwards. The smaller the space you have the more important it becomes to make the most of walls, fences, hedges and the space in between by using freestanding structures and covering them with climbing plants.
We were recently asked a question at the Countryfile Live show about how to make the most of a tiny city garden. It was paved so everything had to be grown in pots. I was on stage with Alan Power, head gardener at the wonderful garden at Stourhead. His advice was to make use of all the available vertical space by planting climbers in pots.
When you’re planting in pots, the bigger the container the better, especially if you’re growing perennial climbers, and always give your plants compost that will sustain growth and flowering. Loam-based compost is always preferable to sustain growth longer, retain moisture better and take up liquid feed more efficiently.
Annual climbers give you quick results and masses of colour. Sweet peas are the go-to plant. They’re easy to raise; we sow our seed in February or March, putting one seed in a module compartment and potting up into half-litre pots, nipping out the growing tip of the
plant when it has produced three leaves to make a stronger plant with several shoots. We put out our plants before they get leggy. Some are grown up hazel and string supports at the back of our raised veg beds. And remember to deadhead and feed them for flowers all summer long.
Ours are a picotee variety, white with a subtle purple edge, aptly named ‘High Scent’. Some years, the two cast iron tubs either side of the front steps are used to grow sweet pea ‘Cupani’. A local blacksmith made us two metal supports which fit into the pots, and by June we have a tower of purple and magenta blooms, with the sweetest scent imaginable. The more you cut the more flowering stems are produced.
We’re experimenting with a deep purple ipomoea this year, using the same supports, one pushed into the ground, the other into a huge pot on either side of a path. Hopefully in a few weeks’ time we’ll have a purple explosion here, emphasised by four magnificent plants of salvia ‘Amistad’, which can itself make an emphatic vertical statement.
A huge rambling rose, ‘Paul’s Himalayan Musk’, uses a copper beech and a crab apple to elevate its 10m shoots and up the same crab apple, clematis ‘Huldine’ grows high into its branches. A rampant honeysuckle has taken over a box hedge and turned itself into a wall, albeit a very beautiful and highly scented wall. It’s Lonicera periclymenum ‘Graham Thomas’, a form of our native woodbine that lacks the pink colouration usually found. Its long trumpet flowers are creamy white at first, becoming yellow. Its scent in the evening is enchanting.
That’s the advantage of scented climbers, you can drink in their perfume at nose level and be surrounded by their fragrance.
‘Annual climbers give quick results and masses of colour. Sweet peas are the go-to plant’