Bring the garden to your doorstep
I’m a fair-weather gardener. During winter I leave my boggy garden – exacerbated this year by months of rain – to the wildlife, with just the odd foray outside to keep an eye on what’s growing. Of course I scurry out two or three times a day to feed my hens and let them out, but I don’t garden. I still like to see and smell plants, so I clutter them around my front door, in pots, pans and buckets, to welcome visitors and to cheer myself up. I’m also very short sighted, so unless I put my glasses on, most of my garden is out of sight as well as out of bounds. The spectacle around my porch changes with the seasons. Pots can be moved as soon as the plants are past their best, either to permanent homes planted in the main garden, or sometimes to spend the summer tucked away in the wild garden, or in the side passage if they like a shady spot. Sometimes, if I’m tempted to buy a plant – as I often am from my local nursery, Tasteful Plants near Faversham – I’ll leave it in a pot by the front door for a starring role for a while, before planting it out. At the moment there are five pots of beautifully marbled helleborus lividus – a lovely native species hellebore, with pale pink buds, that I’d like to get to know a little better, before they’re planted out into their permanent home in the spring border behind the vegetable plot. With my seaside climate, I can grow a wide range of plants that wouldn’t be hardy elsewhere. I pass exotic palms, cordylines, agaves, olives, phormiums, myrtles and yuccas in front gardens all over Whitstable, so I thought I’d take a chance this year with some Phormium ‘Pink Stripe’, with leathery dark bronze spiky leaves, and Astelia ‘Silver Spear’, whose leaves almost exactly match their aluminium coloured pot. To be on the safe side, I keep a collection of bamboo cloches (from andrewcrace. com) ready in the wings, if I hear the temperatures are going to drop. Website greenhousesensations. co.uk offers a smart fleece jacket that covers plant and pot, but lets in air, light and water; you can order hessian by the metre from randjbuildershardware.co.uk and poshcloche.co.uk sells a selection of protective covers. We may not have as wide a spectrum of flower colours available to us at this time of the year, but we can make up the loss with textures and shapes, and shades of green and grey. As a backbone plant, I use box pyramids, but the Christmas Box Sarcococca would have the advantage of smelling delicious, instead of the usual whiff of cats’ spray; and of course we can bring in a little colour with containers, using metal, terracotta, slate, enamel pots and baskets as cachepots. Unexpectedly, there is still fragrance – a wide range of winter-blooming plants flower their socks off to tempt early pollinators (see list above). Tucked in behind a large pot of paperwhites, I’ve included a pot of Lonicera fragrantissima, easy to miss with small green leaves and tiny creamy flowers, but with an unforgettable fragrance to be inhaled with every going in and out. Pots of bulbs can be brought out in succession throughout the year then removed when spent. Early flowering bulbs start the year with tiny Iris reticulata in blues and purples and elegant I. unguicularis (from avonbulbs.co.uk); and a collection of narcissi, including ‘February Gold’, ‘Tete-a-tete’, ‘Lemon Silk’, ‘Early Sensation’, all from broadleighbulbs.co.uk, all auguring spring and all guaranteed to raise the spirits. The view from my kitchen window without my glasses on, focuses on the terrace table, where I’ve set up a tableau of pots including spring-blooming pink cyclamen cuom with greenand-silver marbled leaves (intended to be naturalised in the woodland garden later), a pale blue enamel bowl of royal blue pansies, a caramel-coloured heuchera in a terracotta pan, some grey green Euphorbia myrsinites with lime green bracts, and a collection of herbs: rosemary, thyme and sage, so I don’t have to make sorties outside to the herb garden in the dark, searching for ingredients for my bouquet garni. How to grow a garden indoors,