One of the questions I am most frequently asked when teaching horticulture is how I choose which plants to use when designing a flower border. There are a myriad of ways to answer this question, but one way to help students is to explore the idea of Garden style. This is a fairly nebulous concept but with probably more concrete foundations than we might imagine. For example, if were to ask a group to suggest what sort of plants they might find in a quintessential English country garden, we would rapidly find some common suggestions. Likewise if we thought of a contemporary garden, a cottage garden, a coastal garden, an exotic garden etc.
These styles all have certain features and natural plant associations, and while not wishing in any way to suggest a template they do give a gardener a starting point in border design. I thought it might be quite fun to explore these ideas in a ‘Planting design 101’ series. This week we’ll start with the fundamentals of the iconic ‘English country garden’.
Having tried this on various long-suffering friends and family, I very quickly ended up with a list including the following plants: Roses, Lupins, Iris, Box, Geranium, Catmint, Hydrangea, delphiniums and phlox. If you have a long sunny border for example, you might start with some topiary balls or cones for evergreen structure – always use repeated plants in a long border, and if possible in odd numbers. In the past the topiary would almost always be box, but given the rapid onset of box blight, I would use yew or other alternatives. Then perhaps repeat your roses down the border, and infill with lupins, iris, paniculata hydrangeas, and knit the whole thing together with long-flowering catmint, or geraniums. All this within a relatively pastel range of colour with paths made out of old brick or natural stone and terracotta flared planters. Add in a pergola dripping with wisteria and/or rambling roses, underplanted with foxgloves and alliums and a lavender border surrounding the house and you are instantly aware of the very ‘English’ spirit of the place; the genius loci.
This distilled essence of English gardening can be dressed up or down like a pair of blue jeans for day or night wear. For a more formal look use a tighter colour scheme, stiffer roses, perhaps even in standard lollipop form, keep the border edges straight and make uses of formal vistas and endpoints such as statuary or armillary spheres. If you want a more relaxed vibe, swap out some of the topiary for a small tree that will give structure even if deciduous, such as a Viburnum Kilimanjaro or an Amelanchier, allow the borders to curve sinuously and mix up the pot styles and shapes. Up the romance with floribunda roses, more frothy umbellifers (cow parsley style plants), such as pink Chaerophyllum hirsutum, or later flowering white Selinum wallichianum, or the very trendy Valeriana officinalis and let the tidiness slip with more self seeders allowed to roam free. We can subvert the styles with a bit of crossover into contemporary, with some grasses allowed to add sway to the stiffer roses, a brightening of the colour scheme with some pops of primary colours and perhaps some avant garde modern sculpture, but while you still have the basic ingredients it will remain a fundamentally English garden in style, rooted in the shades of past British horticultural influence, albeit with its top growth subject to a little hybridization.
While we are on the subject of roses, I thought it worth mentioning that David Austin have just launched a new rose for the Queen’s jubilee. A medium sized shrub rose with apple blossom-like blooms in a pinky white shade and a hint of apricot at the centre. With apparently a strong sweet scent it looks like it might be a worthy inclusion in the quintessential English garden! It is called, not unexpectedly, Elizabeth.
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