Almost a seaside garden!
This one-acre plot on the Ayrshire coast has been turned into a tasteful extravaganza of planting
Gardens have many uses, and when Cheryll and Alasdair Cameron and their two young sons moved into their new home on the east coast of Scotland nearly 20 years ago, the outdoor space was perfect. The large lawn lent itself to games of cricket and rugby, there was space for a trampoline, while a tree house was swiftly installed in the eponymous pines.
Unsurprisingly, the couple waited until the boys had left home to start gardening properly. But in the last eight years this blank canvas has been transformed from an adventure playground to a tasteful and orderly horticultural extravaganza.
“An inventor lived here before us and he had no interest in gardening, so it was pretty basic – just the lawn, trees and some large rhododendrons.
But once we started to get interested it was a process of learning and experimentation,” explains Cheryll.
The free-draining soil never gets waterlogged and the maritime climate keeps temperatures mild, so overwintering plants doesn’t tend to be a problem. But the exposure to harsh, salty winds howling in from the coast means
that plants that aren’t adapted to this battering suffer badly from wind burn. “There’s just a golf course between us and the Atlantic and we originally had a row of huge leylandii that were all scorched on the windward side. They looked terrible, but when we took them down, we realised why they’d been planted in the first place!”
She says: “I get a lot of inspiration from Beth Chatto’s The Dry Garden and I’ve read all sorts of books on gardening in coastal situations, so I’ve adapted my gardening style accordingly.
“We had to put in a new windbreak made up of mixed shrubs and I tried all sorts of things, but most successful has been Griselinia littoralis, hawthorn and photinia ‘Red Robin’. The hedge is about eight feet high now, so it gives quite good protection.”
Deciding that the garden needed better ‘bones’, Cheryll started planting evergreen shrubs, including eucalyptus, together with a number of multi-stemmed birches while working out what else would grow. Bulbs proved themselves a successful lowmaintenance form of planting, requiring no lifting or work on this light soil, and from May to July the garden is a riot of colour with lilies, agapanthus and alliums.
This strategy was effective as they found their feet, but after a couple of years, things started to stall. “An early mistake I made was treating the garden like an experiment. I’d buy one plant at a time to see how it would get on, and as a result the garden looked rather dotty! And I just didn’t have the confidence to cut big borders out of the lawn,” admits Cheryll. So they called in some expert help in the form of Glasgow-based garden designer, Jeremy Needham.
“Jeremy designed the big borders, which work really well, and he taught me to simplify, to choose things that thrive and buy lots of them. I’ve realised that planting in groups of five or seven creates a sweeping effect and has far more impact than what I was doing before. It’s been wonderful.”
The site is arranged with about two thirds of the garden to the front of the house and a further third to the rear. Arriving through the side gate to the back, a Japaneseinfluenced courtyard has acers and pittosporum surrounded by gravel, which leads to a striped lawn, running like a river through drifts of herbaceous plants and grasses, including helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’, lime-green Euphorbia polychroma, Stipa gigantea and Cheryll’s new favourite, ever-silver senecio ‘Angel Wings’. These are interspersed with shrubs such as cotinus, choisya and amelanchier.
“Jeremy’s input was invaluable,” says Cheryll. “It was his idea to create a journey down the boardwalk and across the grass to the summerhouse, and the paths lead you around the borders so that you can see them from all sides before you end up back at the house. I like to think I’m at the seaside and walk around with bare feet!”
The overall effect is crisp and jaunty, with a decidedly ‘seaside holiday’ feel. Tall grasses and herbaceous perennials billow like ocean waves in the breeze and timber archways add height, while underfoot the substrate changes from wooden deck to grass to gravel. Seating is judiciously arranged to soak up the Scottish sunshine
and the impression of a seashore is picked up by the decorative pebbles and small rocks that offset both the planting and the summerhouse cum beach hut.
“Next I’m going to turn my attention to the front garden,” says Cheryll, who’s now brimming with new-found design confidence. “There’s a shady border with hydrangeas and phormiums but the two rockeries are due to be replanted next year. I’ll be keeping it simple though.
“I want to get a greater continuity of colour, with one thing leading on to another – a garden is never finished,” she smiles. “I’ve loved my garden this year, and we’re really lucky. I read once that if you look after your garden it looks after you, and I think that, especially at this time, that’s a lovely thought and we’re fortunate to have a green space to look after.”