Tips for sprucing up your garden: Try sex and death

WHEN planning the perfect garden, you’d think your watchwords would be water, sunshine – and luck.

But if you really want your pride and joy to make the neighbours swoon with envy, your mantra needs to be ... sex and death.

Experts say these buzzwords could help you spruce up your garden into one worthy of the Chelsea Flower Show.

Award-winning garden designers Ann-Marie Powell and James Alexander-Sinclair have revealed their top tips for green-fingered magic in the latest edition of the Radio Times.

Under the heading ‘Remember sex and death’, RHS judge Mr Alexander-Sinclair wrote: ‘Gardens are about sex, death and deliciousness. The sex bit is how the plant attracts the bees and pollinate it and then the garden grows. Eventually everything dies.’ He adds: ‘My advice is to ignore what garden advisers tell you and do what makes you happy. You need to enjoy your garden, not worry about it.’

The two experts, who present BBC coverage of the Chelsea Flower Show, suggest the key to a perfect garden should include large plants, lots of flair, bold arches, and even some wildlife.

Chelsea gold medal winner Miss Powell added: ‘Plants that add flair – and that have worked very well at Chelsea in the past – are the ones that, in many ways, have been forgotten. Peonies, irises and lupins are all back in fashion now and they are the ones that get people talking.’

Adding large plants can ‘lift the eye up’ – and planting a tree can brings ‘excitement and glamour to a garden’.

Mr Alexander-Sinclair recommends overriding an age old rule of gardening – that tall goes at the back and short at the front. Instead, gardeners should try putting something ‘tall and gauzy’ at the front, like allium hollandicum.

Meanwhile, Miss Powell warns the UK’s army of garden enthusiasts not to ‘play it safe’ – but instead try to use every space of the garden to create a ‘journey’.

Both also recommend creating a garden like an ‘outside living room’.

And if space isn’t at a premium, you could simply add smaller decorations, such as small containers on tables.

‘The ones that get

people talking’