“Try planting the perfect nighttime garden,” says Anne
If planned carefully, a garden can be a magical, calm place to relax in at dusk and it will set you up for a good night’s sleep, says Anne Swithinbank
THE garden at dusk and after dark is a mysterious place of moon shadow, sweet perfumes and luminous blooms. A rich sunset will favour warm flower shades of red, yellow and orange at the expense of cooler hues. Yet once darkness falls hot colours turn black and our eyes are better at picking out shapes in blue and mauve, as well as the ghostly flowers of white lilies, pale petunias and evening primrose. A carefully planned garden can appear enchanted, like a stage set for Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, and you can almost hear Oberon describing Titania’s bower:
‘Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk roses and with eglantine’.
For those out at work all day, or tied to a home office, roaming the garden on summer evenings brings a calming end to the day. I often wander out just before bedtime listening for owls and the rustlings of small creatures in the undergrowth. When the world is asleep you can hear snails and slugs rasping at leaves, and toads creeping after them. Slow, quiet movements using our littleused night vision beats crashing around by the light of a head torch. Woodbine or honeysuckle (Lonicera
periclymenum) is top of my night-time plant list, for its pale-yellow blossom and rich, fruity fragrance. Like many flowers pollinated by moths, scent is mild by day and more intense from dusk until dawn. The single, fragrant, white blooms of the rambling musk rose (Rosa moschata) shimmer at dusk, but if you want to complete Titania’s bower with eglantine or sweet briar (R. rubiginosa), the pink blooms are better appreciated by day.
Seek out white-flowered cultivars of favourite plants for the different shapes they throw. These range from the large, hovering double blooms of peony ‘Festiva Maxima’, spires of delphiniums, lupins and the obedient plant
(Physostegia virginiana ‘Summer Snow’) to the separate, almost floating flowers of musk mallow (Malva moschata) and drought-tolerant rose campion (Lychnis
‘Alba’). Foliage has its own coronaria part to play, with reflective blue-green ‘Hadspen Blue’, silvery carpets of
Hosta
‘White Nancy’ and Lamium maculatum mounds of ‘Powis Castle’. Artemisia Plant ‘Argentea Variegata’ for Iris pallida pale-blue flags and the strong verticals of cream-edged blue-green leaves.