2. THE JEWEL GARDEN
This remains the heart of our entire garden, the physical and conceptual hub around which all other parts revolve. In many ways it has not changed much at all in the last 20 years, as the basic concept is still to use jewel colours throughout the seasons, in as rich and opulent a display as possible.
It is a big, difficult space to keep looking good, so we have invested an awful lot of thought, time and effort into it. Whereas there are times when most of the other sections of the garden seem to be like an engine that just needs a bit of maintenance here and the odd part replaced or repaired there, the Jewel Garden is very highmaintenance and demanding.
Not so much a well-oiled machine as a distinctly temperamental thoroughbred.
The first phase of the Jewel Garden lasted for about eight years. It took a lot of work to maintain, with hundreds of annuals grown and added each season. But no border stays the same from year to year, let alone decade to decade. To keep things as they are, you have to change all the time. By 2010, some of the beds had become infested with bindweed and so we took out every single plant, washed the roots clean of the spaghetti-like bindweed roots and removed every last scrap of bindweed we could find. It was boring and took ages but was worth it.
I added to the structure with shrubs such as Buddleja ‘Black Night’ and B. globosa, and with the elders that do so well for us, such as the golden Sambucus racemosa ‘Plumosa Aurea’ and the almost black S. nigra f. porphyrophylla ‘Guincho Purple’. I have also added quite a few roses such as ‘William Shakespeare’ and ‘Falstaff’. The Allium hollandicum ‘Purple Sensation’ (left) is a glorious thug whose bulbs we dig up and remove by the barrowload every year.
We now have many more dahlias and cannas in our late summer display and still grow hundreds of zinnias, tithonias, sunflowers, antirrhinums, cosmos and other annuals. The trick is to have a foundation of large groups of perennials and then to allow yourself room and the mindset to play, adding in annuals and individual purchases or gifts where they seem to suit. The Jewel Garden should always be a dance, not a static tableau, however glorious.
OVERLEAF THE WONDERS TO BE FOUND IN THE WILDLIFE GARDEN