Naomi Slade gets ahead of the game to provide support for her summer stars
Get ahead of the game now to stop your summer stars becoming unruly and intrusive
Gardens are charming, addictive and perverse creatures. You throw love, compost and inspiration at them, yet whatever you do, they can still sometimes sulk or flourish wildly as they see fit.
With a blank canvas and dreadful soil, I spent three years cajoling my garden to do my bidding and grow. Then, last year, I waited six months for the summer performance. And all of a sudden it was doing too well. By July everything was magnificently tall… but far, far too wide! I loved it – who wouldn’t? The beautiful, vertical heleniums, Verbena bonariensis and sweet peas, but the cosmos was sprawling sideways and geranium ‘Rozanne’, wonderful, floriferous and covered in bees though it was, was flopping all over the path, which presented traffic hazards all of its own.
A wise man once told me you should always get plant supports in by the end of March. Later than that, he said, and the garden will be ge ing ahead of
you and you won’t catch up. And if you wait until midsummer you don’t stand a chance. So this year I won’t be caught out! Indeed, I’m so keen to get ahead I’m staking even before I finish cu ing down all the perennials – they’re still looking pre y good as stems go, providing both structure and shelter for creepy crawlies, and it’ll be easy to cut back later as the inevitably narrow borders mean that everything is accessible at all times.
The idea with supports is to create a kind of unobtrusive corsetry that blends nicely into the background and keeps the plants in check. At Malvern Autumn Show in September, I found my perfect obelisk on a stand called Metal in Bloom (www.metalinbloom.co.uk). It was smart, solid and neat and, since limiting the number of different materials and styles is good design practice in a small space, I recently ordered up a multi-pack of plant supports to match.
The pack contains a selection of tall, short, narrow and wide hoops and although shiny and new now, they’ll soon develop a subtle patina and se le into the scheme. Pushed into the ground they should provide a robust restraint for even the most wayward and hefty of perennials. This leaves me free to get on with sowing cosmos and planning my borders for this year, happy in the knowledge that no ma er how big they grow, I’ll still be able to get down the garden path!