Naomi Slade sets her sights on creating a new garden green screen
I’ve found that fruit is often the planting solution to add interest and form to a small space
Having decided, more or less, where everything is going to live in my garden, I’ve been turning my a ention to how it looks and feels. When there isn’t much landscape to play with, however, some of the usual design principles need some thinking about.
It adds interest if you can’t see everything at a glance, but this is a challenge – not just because space for plants is limited, but because the garden is substantially lower than the house so you can see both into it and over the top. As a result, you need an awful lot of height to create the desired impact. About a third of the way along the garden I’ve installed a narrow, curved slice of a border, pointed at one end and then expanding, like a crescent moon. Into this I’ve packed perennials and bulbs, but it also needs structure to work properly: and especially so in winter. Cornus is a trouper, so C. alba ‘Baton Rouge’ gets to do its bright-red stem thing at the fat end of the border, where it’s currently looking particularly snazzy. At the other end, near the path, a low, dwarf apple tree, Maloni® Lilly® is doing well pruned to grow fairly flat along the line of the bed. The central bit has proven more of a challenge, however. It requires something that’s decently tall, very slim, interesting most of the time, and that isn’t an inky, light-obscuring Italian cypress! Essentially, I need the woody equivalent of Verbena bonariensis to help create a translucent, yet robust, green screen across the garden, and a vertical accent. And, as so often, the solution has presented itself in the form of a fruit tree.
Columnar apple Malini® Subito® (www.lubera. co.uk) grows 2-3m (6½-10ft) tall but only around 50cm (1¾ft) wide, so it should fit the bill. Usefully tolerant of part shade, the blossom will complement nearby bulbs in spring, while in late summer the red fruit will mingle with the seasonal perennials.
It’s still a baby so won’t have immediate impact, but planted now it can get its roots down over winter and by this time next year it should be starting to hold its own!