City and Country Gardens
Checking out the online competition
Design and construction
It’s all about YOU!
Having been grounded by this flipping broken toe, I have been Christmas shopping on the internet. It’s been great actually. Far from losing the Christmas spirit, I haven’t had to contend with huge queues for car parks, interminable Christmas carols and shop assistants, with mistletoe headbands and berry-looking acne, telling me my card has been declined.
The internet has allowed me to shop all over the world for all kinds of wonderful things. Instead of traipsing into the same old shops, I’ve bought some great things! Everything has arrived perfectly, beautifully packaged, and often with little notes inside from the supplier.
While exploring this cyber world, I’ve been amused at the garden design companies offering garden designs by post. They have all kinds of services, starting from around £25. Incredible! Don’t these people need to eat?
If you measure and photograph your garden, they will send you back a design showing all the key features that you can incorporate. Hmm…
Designing someone’s garden is such a personal and emotive thing, making this postal service is on a par with marrying a Thai bride. I really love the fact that a new garden is all about the garden’s owner. YOU! It has something to do with hard landscaping, of course, and the need to get around the space. However, generalisation stops there.
New gardens are wonderful things. They should reflect your personality and your décor. We do need to know if you met in Thailand on a beach, at the plumbers merchants or at school. We do want to know if all ten of the family come over every Sunday, or if it’s just the two of you with scrambled eggs and champagne for breakfast. It’s only by talking to you that your true self starts to appear. A very ordinary life can suddenly show itself as extraordinary once you realise there’s a passion in there for Japan, or maybe collecting old Chevy trucks.
Children are a huge part of family life for many years and I think it’s so important to show them the magic of the garden from an early age. We are just finishing a garden in Worthing and the children are each going to have their own small seat with their initials painted behind. They will have their own little raised area to plant seeds and small plants and they can kneel on their seat to tend the plants. Even a small garden can be adapted for you all to use.
I had a lovely email from some clients the other day, after we had finished their roof terrace. It read:
“We had a lovely night out here the other weekend, wrapped in cashmere pashminas, drinking dessert wine after a big dinner. It was a lovely end to a lovely evening. What a place you’ve created for us!”
I don’t think you can get that kind of garden through the post.
Plants
Silver Birch trees
I have been buying and planting quite a few Silver Birch trees for clients recently, and my favourite is Betula Jacquemontii.
The stem is so white and as the tree gets older, the bark turns whiter, and in the winter it is simply beautiful as a specimen against a darker background.
I like to plant them in groups of three. You can either plant them as straight stemmed trees, or you can plant them at an angle to make a multi-stemmed group as they grow. They will need planting and staking to keep them growing in this way and a piece of wood will be needed, placed against each stem, and angled to make them grow away from each other.
Grown in this way, the group looks particularly spectacular underplanted with spring bulbs.
Betula pendula is the weeping Silver Birch and the long branches weep all the way down to the ground. The tree looks best standing alone so that you can really appreciate its form and shape.
Things to do
Interesting Christmas presents
Who wants to go outside on these damp, cold and miserable days? Our lovely garden lady, Fiona, has been working in all weathers this week and doing a winter tidy up for clients. She is also on a bulb planting mission and we have planted hundreds and hundreds of bulbs in some of the new gardens that were built this year. It’s a good time to plant – while there’s lots of space in amongst new shrubs, trees and plants. There’s still time to put in tulips – although it may be difficult to find them in the garden centres now.
Think about buying a tree as a Christmas present. You can buy the loveliest tree, for an excellent price. Turning up at a friends house with a tree tied with ribbons is far more exciting than a bottle of wine and a box of chocolates. Fruit trees come on dwarf rooting stocks which means they won’t grow more than a metre or two high. Most gardens will have space for a small apple tree. For friends with larger gardens, buy them Malus Gorgeous (an amazing white flowered crab apple) or an ornamental cherry tree or magnolia.
In my first days as a keen horticultural student, I bought some friends a tulip tree. I had read about its amazing green and yellow tulip shaped flowers that covered the tree profusely and its beautiful autumn colour. I should also have read a bit more. It doesn’t flower for 20 years and grows to over 100 feet tall. It’s still there in a garden in Crowborough (they moved years ago!) and towers above every garden in the street…. Don’t let that put you off. Just look how long a tree can last when Christmas is over!
