Wild about plants
Grass snakes, birds, squirrels, frogs and minibeasts are all welcome in this beautiful garden with changing colour themes all year round
Planting for wildlife was uppermost in Margot Grice’s mind when she designed her irregularshaped garden in Essex. “I wanted to include plants for all seasons to provide year-round interest for myself and the wildlife,” she says.
The garden peaks in late summer, which is when it opens for the NGS, with fiery-coloured dahlias, chrysanthemums, tithonias, heleniums, lobelia and rudbeckia. She complements these shades with swathes of blue asters, salvias, agastache, buddleja and thalictrum. “I like to provide colour themes in my planting, and these change from season to season,” Margot says.
Hundreds of snowdrops and hellebores emerge at the start of the year, followed by a host of early spring bulbs in the scree garden that her late husband Michael constructed. She also has a greenhouse devoted to alpines with a large collection of hepaticas.
Pink flowers are the focus for summer with Althaea cannabina, buddleja ‘Miss Ruby’, phlox, spires of verbascum and veronica ‘First Love’, cleome and hibiscus humming with bees and butterflies on sunny days.
Margot has an eye for clever combinations, with a black and white border featuring inky-leaved black elder and grassy Ophiopogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’ contrasting with white agapanthus and the oak-leaved Hydrangea quercifolia ‘Snow Queen’.
A shadier mauve border is home to purple-leaved Cotinus coggygria, entwined with a viticella clematis, spires of purple loosestrife, soaring purple angelica with the hooded flowers of Strobilanthes atropurpurea, heuchera and tradescantia providing front-ofborder interest.
Red beds dominate in late summer, flashing with crocosmia ‘Firestarter’, Lobelia tupa, the mini pompons of sanguisorba, dahlias,
chrysanthemums, Japanese bloodgrass, achillea and helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’.
There’s still plenty of interest in winter with striking birch bark, evergreen ferns, fruiting crab apples and berrying cotoneaster, pyracantha and euonymus.
“I try to make use of every spot,” Margot explains. “In a problem dry area under a silver birch, snowdrops start the season to give early bees sustenance and then I let selfseeded plants have free rein. Lunaria annua ‘Chedglow’, a dark-leaved honesty, Linaria purpurea ‘Canon Went’, Eryngium giganteum 'Miss Willmott’s Ghost' and Digitalis stewartii all thrive here and are good for insects.”
Margot gardens organically as much as possible but she does resort to placing one slug pellet in each hosta pot in April. “This seems to see off the little slugs that lurk in the soil and my plants remain hole-free,” she says.
There are bird boxes, log piles, a surrounding brook, where kingfishers can be spotted, and a pond to help encourage local wildlife. Margot has four huge compost heaps and spreads the contents of these on her borders each winter to help improve the heavy clay soil. The heaps are home to grass snakes, which laid 200 eggs this year, so she can’t turn them until September when the eggs will have hatched.
“Gardening for wildlife does have its drawbacks,” Margot says. “The brook floods in winter, worms from the compost attract moles, the grass snakes have eaten my frogs, wasps are attracted to the fruit trees in August (but they’re a great help early in the year when they harvest aphids to feed their young), the lawn is bumpy from hummocks of red ants, which I don’t remove because the green woodpeckers love them, and the cheeky squirrels bury my neighbours’ walnuts all over my garden and even in my patio pots.
“However, having a garden alive with so many different creatures – from the minibeasts in my wood piles to dragonflies flitting over the pond, bees and butterflies swarming around the insect-rich flowers and birds visiting on every day of the year – is such a rich reward," she says.