Carol Klein explains why you should take cues from wild places and answers your questions
For the best success on your plot, be guided by natural habitats
Agarden is a garden is a garden – or is it? Everyone’s garden is individual, yet they all have one thing in common – in that they’re governed by natural laws. However much we attempt to impose our will on our plots, unless we recognise and take into consideration their positive aspects and their shortcomings, we’ll never make the most of them.
One of the most rewarding exercises is to compare our own gardens to habitats in nature. If your garden is mostly in shade, look at woodland to see which plants thrive there. However, it isn’t a question of planting shady areas with the self-same plants you’d find on a woodland floor, but garnering clues about how that habitat works.
For example, spring is one of the busiest times of the year – full of ‘Cinderella’ plants that exploit the months between January and May when the soil's warming up and there's light because the trees are bare. Once they come into leaf and the canopy fills in overhead, most of the plants underneath, having flowered and set and distributed their seed, go to sleep until they awake again next spring.
Many woodland plants are bulbs, snowdrops and daffodils for instance, but plants with different systems – wood anemones with their little stoloniferous roots or fibrous-rooted primroses, which compromise by shrinking into
themselves without completely disappearing – all have ways of coping. Woodland plants from all over the temperate regions, mainly of the northern hemisphere, adopt the same or similar practices so there’s a wealth of plants from which to choose.
In the autumn, too, there's a window – literally; as leaves begin to shrivel or fall, more light is admitted and Japanese anemones, tricyrtis and their ilk come into their own.
In our shady gardens, though, we need colour and interest through summer. Shrubs that can cope with lower light levels – hydrangeas are a good example – contribute colour and structure, while there are many foliage plants that bring subtle but notable colour, texture and form.
Though Brunnera macrophylla ‘Jack Frost’ gives us sprays of blue forget-me-not-like flowers in spring, its true glory is its resplendent, heart-shaped, silver leaves that bring glamour to shady spots in late summer. The variety of textures, patterns and shapes of fern fronds is infinite.
If your garden is exposed and in full light all day, with dry and poor soil, then look to the seaside, moor and mountain for clues as to what will thrive in it.
Eryngium bourgatii, for example, loves its inhospitable spot in our sharply drained raised bed in full sun. The type of plant that grows all around our coasts copes by creating ground-hugging mats which keep its roots cool, and by developing thick stoloniferous roots that can store energy and reshoot after drought.
Without narrowing our choice of plants, taking our cue from nature means that the plants we choose are more likely to flourish, making our gardens happier places.
‘Eryngium bourgatii loves its inhospitable spot in full sun’