Design ideas: gravel gardens In the first of a new series, award-wining designer Andy Sturgeon champions an underused planting style
In the first of a new design series, the award-winning designer Andy Sturgeon, looks at a style of planting that can adapt to many situations
Ifind that certain styles of planting have been somewhat hogging the limelight. Prairie planting anyone? Meadows perhaps? Now this is all well and good, and of course they have their place but they lack versatility – and, in the depths of winter, there’s basically nothing there. Gravel gardening may not immediately grab the headlines but should in fact be far more popular and better recognised. It works on all scales, large and small and its relatively easy to look after – perhaps about half the time of a conventional mixed border. I’ve used it equally successfully in minuscule London gardens as well as country estates where vast walled gardens need a large, planted space without the expense of an army of gardeners.
I first came to this style of planting through Joyce Robinson’s Denmans – the garden made famous by the late designer John Brookes, which had dry river beds and gravel paths creating space and light within the garden and among the plants themselves. Then Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on the beach at Dungeness came into our consciousness before Beth Chatto tore up her car park to make a gravel garden that had people finally taking notice.
The element that links these gardens and plantings together is that they have a gentle sense of ‘somewhere else’. An invented habitat of never normally seen together exotics that can’t co-exist happily within the environment of a conventional mixed border, yet the planting mix can be skewed to suit whatever you want: Mexican agaves and Dasylirion can be deployed in a more contemporary setting or for Mediterranean purists, lavender, rosemary and olives.
But there really aren’t many rules especially on larger scales. A scattering of evergreens can make a loose structure so that you have a genuinely year-round garden and then almost anything goes. Rigid colour schemes are not necessarily required and a contrasting f lower colour and leaf shape from one plant to the next can be the recipe for success. A range of heights is good too. Individual shrubs or small trees emerging from their ground-hugging neighbours and spires of Verbascum erupting from the gravel make for eye-catching punctuation.
Grasses, perennials and shrubs become agreeable neighbours. Self-seeders are welcomed and all manner of bulbs can pop up where they like; whatever the colour, whatever the height. The aim should be two-fold: in some cases plants should knit together covering the gravel and cutting down maintenance. Elsewhere, gaps between plants are good. Individual species are shown off and the sun can get down to bake the rhizomes of bearded irises and foxtail lilies without the shading from other plants. Open areas of gravel can appear more natural and also provide a seed bed for the likes of Verbena bonariensis, Stipa tenuissima and Dierama ensuring that the garden is never the same from one year to the next. And remember that in design terms, ‘space is good’ so don’t be tempted to fill it all up.
Wherever possible a local gravel should always be used to visually tie the garden into its setting and to any vernacular materials nearby. It will also have a lower carbon footprint.
The gravel mulch should be around 5-7cm deep and spread over all beds so there is no longer any bare soil, and under no circumstances put down any sort of membrane beneath the gravel. There is nothing worse than seeing the edges of some awful material poking up through the stones. You want the worms to pull those stones down into the soil to improve drainage further and prevent excessive run-off into drains during heavy downpours.
The same loose gravel can make an ideal path surface as long as the stone sizes aren’t too big, preferably 10mm diameter and definitely no bigger than 20mm or it will be like walking on a shingle beach. If you want a more solid surface you could upgrade to a self-binding gravel on the paths that sets hard and has just a few loose stones on the surface but you need to choose a gravel of exactly the same tone.
Increasingly winter wet kills more plants than the cold does so drainage is key and a gravel garden solves the problem. Get it right and you can embrace climate change and grow all sort of exotics hailing from Mediterranean climates around the world, including Australia, America and North Africa. If space allows, creating topography is a useful device. Crushed brick and clean builders’ rubble can be covered in topsoil to create free-draining mounds and then paths can wind through the valleys they create. The result can be incredibly naturalistic. A sort of somewhere else, yet nowhere in particular.
Gravel gardening works on all scales and is easy to look after – about half the time of a conventional border