Carol Klein takes your round her Glebe Cottage garden
Your eye is taken by wave after wave of fluffy astilbes in the ‘Leonard Messel’ garden
Several places in the garden here at Glebe Cottage have specific names but the next area we come to on our conducted tour is referred to by several epithets. Sometimes it’s ‘the bed below Annie’s garden’ or ‘the big bed just before you get to the oak fence’ but for our purposes, and from now on, perhaps it ought to be ‘the ‘Leonard Messel’ garden’.
Though this garden is full of herbaceous plants and bulbs, its most outstanding feature is the magnolia ‘Leonard Messel’. It’s grown into a sizeable tree now and its branches are smothered in their starry pink cups in late April, visible even from the house. It stands on the west side of broad slate steps that take you from the path below Annie’s garden to a lower path which runs from the track to the field edge, en route to another path which leads up the garden close to the native hedge.
Just below the bed is a long bed with the oak fence at its back. It’s almost permanently in shade, supporting a wealth of hellebores and snowdrops and two cercidiphyllum trees, which emit a delicious smell of toffee apples during cold spells in both spring and autumn.
The main planting in the bed further along from the magnolia is at its best from late summer through to the onset of winter, though it goes through several changes during that time.
First out are astilbes. There are two varieties here, both giving different effects. First to flower is Astilbe chinensis taquetii, with dense spires of purple-pink flowers. Its whole effect is stiff and upright, although the individual flowers that compose the spikes are fluffy. It’s a good plant close to the steps, where its straight stems make a vertical emphasis that delineates where the bed ends and the steps begin.
It’s repeated further down this gently sloping bed, too, where we use waves of plants that run from the top path to the path below, but never in straight lines. The idea is to create broad swathes of a few plants which mingle here and there without invading
Though this garden is full of herbaceous plants and bulbs, its most outstanding feature is the magnolia ‘Leonard Messel’
each other’s space. As you walk along the path either above the bed or below it, your eye is taken by wave after wave of different plants. Hopefully, this creates rhythm and movement rather than a static arrangement.
Late in July, the other astilbe lends its graceful frothy fronds of creamy white to the arrangement. Tall and elegant, astilbe ‘Professor Van der Wielen’ is a poetic plant that blends artlessly with the phlox and carry on the display through August and into September.
The phlox we use here is a variety of Phlox arendsii called ‘Luc’s Lilac’. Rather than having large heads of substantial flowers, a characteristic of P. paniculata, this is a much gentler plant with small lavender flowers, giving it a more naturalistic, wild look.
The phlox and astilbe stay where they are but one plant in this combination is more fancy-free. It’s a willowherb that used to go under the name of Epilobium angustifolium but is now called Chamaenerion angustifolium, and is known to most of us as rosebay willowherb. In the United States it’s called fireweed because it’s one of the first plants to regenerate after forest fires. Ours is white flowered and it fits into the scheme beautifully – wherever it puts itself.
As all these perennials start their autumn descent, grasses take over, mainly molinia with its dainty swaying stems and one of autumn’s glories, Actaea racemosa, opens its spires of dainty white flowers, heavily
scented and attractive to both gardeners and insects.