Latest Homes magazine

Resolve to make your garden a magical place for the New Year

With Louisa Bell of City and Country Gardens

I’m making a new year’s resolution to make my garden the best it’s ever been. Last year I spent just a little extra time and effort sowing seeds, and tying things in as they grew, and the rewards were so noticeable. I had beautiful white sweet peas growing over my pergola and the scent was beautiful when we sat there for lunch. They all mixed in with my purple verbena bonariensis, and looked so lovely. Definitely a combination I’ll be repeating.

I sowed cosmos and Californian poppies in the borders, and large swathes of nigella – love in a mist. They all did so well, because I watered them properly, thinned them out and generally looked after them. Sometimes it’s hard to make yourself get out in the garden and life is so busy. We do create some lovely low maintenance gardens, where you can just look out of the window and it will all look neat and tidy, but higher maintenance does bring greater rewards.

Whether you’re a high or low maintenance gardener, I’d like everyone to have a beautiful garden this year. It really is easy to knock a garden into shape. It’s something we do all the time and, remember, you have a whole room out there! It really can be turned into something special.

With the addition of special seating, comfortable cushions (that stay out all year), beautifully built walls and expertly planted beds, you can have a garden that makes you long to be outside.

Some plants are especially slow growing, or can be clipped and shaped to give formality to your garden. If you’re a very tidy person, these topiary shapes are especially comforting if you like order. I like a mix of order and nature, and the clipped shapes in my garden act like punctuation in the borders.

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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!

Gardens join modern technology and take a step into the future

Design and construction

The crimplene garden
Please! Can we all raise our standards just a bit!

What are your expectations when it comes to a garden? Don’t you think that you deserve to have somewhere fabulous, amazing and gorgeous outside your door?

Things have changed so much in the last generation. There was a time when being forty meant you were resigned to trousers with elasticated waists and crimplene was the only suit material. Mothers wore pinnies, dads were the only ones allowed to wire a plug and the Ford Anglia was about as fast as it got.

In just a small time, just a few short years, we have gone from a life of no choice to multiple choice and a throwaway society. Mums and dads have better clothes sense than their children and we can all borrow each other’s stuff.

Houses have digital things and huge TVs and the Roberts Radio is seen as an icon of nostalgic style. Baking and dusting has been superseded by the ping of piercing film and microwaves and mum dashing off to the gym.

Yet somehow, our gardens are still back there in the crimplene age. People don’t seem to think that they deserve a garden that matches their house, clothes or personality. We buy awful things for the garden that we’d never have indoors. My own courtyard looks like a bomb’s hit it at the moment. But I have an excuse. The builders did it.

Please, please think about having a lovely garden next year. If it was a room, you wouldn’t be so neglectful and thoughtless. Do you really think that your garden does you justice? Do your friends go “Wow” when they look out of the door? Are they just desperate to get out there and explore?

I know getting the garden done hasn’t been a priority up until (hopefully) now, but do think about putting something lovely in its place next year. You could be sitting out there and really enjoying life if you get yourself organised.

You wouldn’t dream of wearing a baggy old cardigan and slippers, or a big pinafore over your clothes would you? So why do you want your garden to look like a flipping time warp?

I know you think that I’m just saying this so you call up and book us to design and build your garden (ok, I admit this would be nice!) but also, I honestly do know what fantastic pleasure everyone gets from their garden when it’s been built properly. We all shop, hoping for that feeling of pleasure, but it’s so transient and sometimes has the opposite effect. A garden isn’t like that. Every client says to me that they haven’t looked back. The garden is a joy and has undoubtedly been worth every single penny.

Ok, I think I’ve nagged you enough. The rest, as they say, is up to you.

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Design and construction

Go on, treat yourself! There are simple pleasures in the garden.
Well, what a gloomy time it is. And such scare-mongering too. Half the country’s data lost on a couple of CDs and millions of people rushing off to change their pin numbers in case of fraud. Funnily enough, it’s always the people that are paranoid about these things that get robbed. Those that leave their car unlocked overnight, are cavalier about leaving great wads of cash on window sills when the builders are in and use obvious pin numbers rarely get fleeced. They have a laissez-faire attitude to life, and life treats them in the same way.

And then England lost the football. Poor Steve McClaren only got a 2.5 million payoff and it was the saddest day of his life. Look on the bright side, with Poland getting through our pubs will still be full of loyal supporters cheering on their team.

The sub prime fiasco will continue to hit the banks, and even if inflation falls Mervyn won’t drop interest rates for the man on the street, because the banks are having to pay out so much more to borrow money from each other. Fuel is well over a pound now, mortgage payments are hurting, food is just a ridiculous price if you have even one teenager to feed and Christmas is coming, in all its credit card glory.

I read a really good book this year called Not Buying It. The writer had been rushing around just before Christmas, spending money for the sake of it, racking up her credit card and suddenly saw it for the madness it has become. She spent the next year ‘not buying it’ and had a list of essentials that she (almost) stuck to religiously for the whole year. It was a great read and really made me re-think the useless things that we all buy.

You know, of course, that there’s a garden story coming along here somewhere don’t you! But I just want to remind you of the joy of the garden. I know that building the garden is not an inexpensive venture. (I can almost feel some of my clients nodding their heads sagely!) but the infrastructure of any building work in a house and garden is a permanent, physical undertaking. However, once the hard landscaping is completed, the garden can become a place of really small inexpensive joys. Where else can you buy a small paper packet of seeds and create a whole border of the most wonderful colour and scent, and still collect the seeds again for next year. One small packet of seeds – at £1.99 – and you have a border of cosmos, love in a mist, poppies, candytuft – forever! I just can’t wait for Christmas to be over so that I can start sowing my seeds again for next year. There will always be something different – a new variety I haven’t tried before – or a different colour. There will also be something ‘tricky’ that may or may not work. When you get something special to grow, the achievement is something you want to share with everyone you know.

If you’re a true gardener, you’ll know there is such pleasure in sending a friend or sister home with a small tray of plants or a pot with a newly grown or emerging plant.

Plants

Cut flowers
We will, no doubt, all be buying flowers for friends and family over the Christmas period. I do get fed up with flowers that fade in just a couple of days but ready made bunches from the supermarket are so much cheaper than buying ‘by the stem’ from a florist. Supermarkets guarantee some of their bouquets for seven or fourteen days, but I am sure you have all had roses that have drooped miserably a couple of days later.

If you receive a bunch of flowers, then try to stand them in water almost up to their necks for a couple of hours before you start arranging them. And do arrange them. Don’t just unwrap them and plonk them into a vase in the same shape as the bouquet, please! Take out each stem, one at a time, and remove all the leaves that are going to be below the water level in the vase. Cut at least an inch off the stems of each bloom. With woody stems, slice up the stem of the plant for an inch or two.

Put in the foliage stems first, and then arrange all the similar blooms around the edge of the vase. Start to add the special blooms – the larger headed flowers or gerberas, roses etc.

Keep the water topped up, or better still change the water completely every day. If the flowers are for you, or someone special, go to a proper florist. Find out what day their delivery arrives, and pay good money for each stem. In three weeks time, when they’re still blooming, you’ll have spent the same as your supermarket buy.

Things to do

‘Toe-tal’ presents
I’m feeling sorry for myself. I broke my big toe quite spectacularly this week. A picture fell off the wall and crashed down onto my poor little bare toes. I have broken the joint and the bits either side as well. If you’ve ever stubbed your toe hard, times it by ten and you can imagine how it might have felt,and still feels. I can’t drive for at least four weeks so all my Christmas shopping is going to have to happen on-line or imaginatively. I can’t even get it wet, so soaking in the bath is also a luxury I shall have to forego without one leg stuck in the air.

I am going to order lots of terracotta pots from my local nursery, and soil, plants, bulbs and small conifers and things. That way, I can sit in the garden and pot up some plants to give to friends and family for Christmas presents. The bulbs will flower in the spring, and the winter pansies, ivy and cyclamen will look lovely throughout the next few weeks.

There are lots of people out there that won’t be better in six weeks’ time, so I’m trying not to feel too sorry for myself, but ‘things to do’ won’t be happening much in my garden for now!

What’s coming up in the garden this week. By Louisa Bell of City and Country Gardens

Design and construction

On the level
Buying a house is a huge decision, undertaken after a ten minute visit with a biased estate agent. As you walk around looking at the views, you are mentally making mortgage calculations in your head. Can we afford it, could we live with this carpet for now? People start off with a fixed list – “ We must have four bedrooms and detached” – and then fall in love with a three bedroomed semi. One thing that isn’t usually a compromise is the garden. If somebody wants a garden, they’ll rarely buy a property without that outdoor space.

People’s attitudes to their gardens fascinate me. To some it’s a complete priority to get the garden done. They’ve thought it through. They already know that we will probably need a digger, dumper and space to drag through unwanted trees. They also know that this will make a mess. Access can be critical if levels need changing. We will often be able to change levels within a landscape without removing soil from site. This is the ‘cut and fill’ option. However, we still need a digger to move the soil around. If we need to reduce levels drastically, the soil needs to be removed, and this needs a digger and dumper.

Access is needed for skips and grab and tip lorries and the driveway is often commandeered for a couple of weeks. Once the main clearance has happened, life can return to some normality. After that, its men moving soil around and then the infrastructure of walls and paths can go in place.

Even a garden that seems very flat to the eye will have level issues. It’s imperative that drives, paths and patios all drain away from the house and have the correct ‘falls’. If the doors at the back of the house are lower than the garden, the earth will have to move!

We are working on five sites this week, which is keeping us busy! Three are hugely sloped and two are flat. The two flat ones are the more difficult ones, from a level point of view and will be the ones where the most soil is actually taken off site. The smallest, flattest one has a kitchen door that’s a good foot below the rest of the garden. Therefore the rest of the garden has to go down over a foot and lead away from the door.

Our most sloping site – 8 metre drops from top to bottom, and a metre from side to side – is a much more straightforward job of cut and fill, but going from this to this (see pictures below) needs forward thinking by a client.

Plants

Block mentality
The planted garden lets everyone down at this time of the year. A garden without design is a miserable thing in December. The lawn could have had another cut, but it was too wet and now it’s covered in leaves. The borders are full of brown, rotting plants that the frost has finally permeated and killed off. A few apples hang disconsolately from their branch and the last couple of leaves hang on trees like survivors of a ship wreck, just waiting for the next wave of wind to finish them off. Of course, the designed garden is still a thing of beauty, but I would say that, wouldn’t I! The infrastructure holds it all together.

The paths, patios, pergolas, walkways, lighting, water features. They all look just as good now as they did in the summer, and the designer’s planting is so different from a gardener’s plants. We’re not scared to plant in blocks of shape, colour and texture. You’ll never go and put seven of the same plant into your trolley at the garden centre, but we will! The garden will have form right through the winter, and even though things are dying off, there is still enough shape and structure to hold the garden together through these next few weeks, until the lovely bulbs start poking through. A joyful time!

Your plant of the week should really be the group that looks best, not the individual. One sedum will look miserable now, but nine will look fabulous. One clump of grass will have started to bend over, but a whole swathe of grasses will look magnificent in the frost. Even roses that are pruned into shape will add something to the picture. Little joys of plants will punctuate the garden throughout December and I am hoping to have a New year’s day count of flowers, but right now it’s blocks and sweeps of plants that keep it all together. Remember, always buy in groups and never less than three!

Things to do

Smile at the sink
In the winter garden, there are still little pots of plants that will struggle along and flower bravely. My Mum always has pots of lovely little flowers in her house or on the step just outside her French doors. She brings them into the warmth, and they decide to blossom like mad. Yesterday, she had the most beautiful old terracotta pot of violas.

Once they’re finished, she pops them back into a sheltered spot to recover, and brings in something else. I will start buying bulbs every week now. The nursery has hyacinths in bud, and pots of narcissi. Put an old table outside – buy one from a junk shop and paint it – right near the window where you can see it from the kitchen sink or the sitting room doors. Buy five or seven lovely pots of different sizes, or find old terracotta pots, and pop in a selection of plants from the nursery. Use bulbs in a couple, ivy in another and flowering pansies. Group them on the table and I promise they will give you such pleasure through the coming weeks. As Christmas approaches, add baubles and ribbons and string little fairy lights through them. Just one small table for mankind and something lovely to look at, as you stand at the sink.

For all the things in your garden, talk to us!
City and Country Gardens
01273 202115 / 01903 892285
www.city-gardens.net

What’s coming up in the garden this week. By Louisa Bell of City and Country Gardens

Design and construction

Solid as a rock?
The sub-prime mortgage crisis will eventually hit us all. I don’t think banks should be allowed to hide the extent of their exposure to the crisis until their figures are released. It’s like now there are problems. Barclays is turning down 50 per cent of all credit card applications now, and reducing the credit limit for their existing customers. The only good news is that interest rates will probably drop as we all stop spending money.

What does this mean for the housing market? Well, here we all are, sitting in our houses that are worth more than our parents could have ever believed possible. But it’s all relative unless you’re seriously going to convert it into cash and drive off around Europe in a VW camper and never enter the property market again. Our houses are worth lots of useless money. It just means we pay the banks and building societies huge amounts each month so we can live in the house that has been over-inflated by the banks and building societies.

On top of this, with stamp duty and fees it now means it costs the average householder £15,000 (and the rest) to move. That’s just to go from one utility bill address to another.

As you can see from the number of skips and builders’ vans all around us, we’re staying put. We’re moving up, out, down and across and making space and doing with what we’ve got. Creating more space is a thought-provoking exercise, but knocking down a wall here, adding a window there can make a huge difference to a house. Spending £10,000 indoors will also add that money back into your house value (meaningless I know), but it’s not a cheque written out to Gordon or the estate agent.

You obviously know that I’m coming to the garden don’t you? But think of this as space for work too. We have been putting in some great outdoor offices. Lined and insulated and measuring 12 ft by 10 ft, there’s room for a desk; plug in your iPod, install great lighting and it’ll be comfortable, warm and secure throughout the winter. That’s a big room, and all for around £8,000.

The garden itself is such a useable space. I hear clients say time and again that they never used their garden before. Now it’s built properly, they can use it all the time. It’s great to eat outside and sit outside. Look at the November we’ve had. We had a great bonfire party last weekend, and we barbecued, lit a bonfire, had the fireworks and didn’t have to go indoors for anything except more beer.

Money spent on the garden is such a worthwhile investment. It’s better than paint and carpets. Look at the size of your garden, compared to the rooms in your house. If that was a room, just think what you could do with it! Let us tell you what’s possible. There’s no need for that For Sale sign.

Plants

Holly
Ilex aquifolium is he Latin name. Berries, prickly, Xmas – holly makes us think of all these things. Holly is a great tree for all gardens. For a start, as a security measure, it’s perfect for planting along hedges and boundaries. Nobody will want to climb over your fence! It’s evergreen so it keeps its leaves all through the year, but the leaves remain green and glossy and lovely, whatever the weather. Holly looks wonderful in the snow too. There’s something about the outline of those spiky leaves and the red berries against the white ground.

Holly is very easy to grow. A holly tree will often seed itself into your garden too, and you see them growing in hedgerows. They also grow in dense shade, so they’re seen underneath beech and oak trees.

Britain is the only place in the world to have holly woods. These are ecologically equivalent to the evergreen cloud forests of South America and China. So you can see how important our native plant is.

In folklore, the amount of berries on the holly tree is supposed to tell us if the winter will be harsh. It’s also thought to be extremely bad luck to cut down a holly tree, but it is okay to cut the branches and bring them indoors in the winter. This was a pagan tradition but was eventually accepted by Christianity (just like they hi-jacked Christmas itself) as the spines on the leaves symbolised the crown of thorns and the red berries the blood of Christ.

This notwithstanding, it’s a good evergreen shrub with prickly bits and berries on the female plant only. Of course.

Things to do

Winter care
Keep an eye on the weather. Rainstorms, gales, frosts and sudden temperature variations are all common at this time of the year. Keep your plants tied in securely, check tree stakes so that newly planted trunks are helped through any winter gales.

Cut back any herbaceous plants, with thick woody stems, right down to ground level. It’s quite dangerous in the spring when one is weeding the borders (sounds quite Jane Austen doesn’t it?) as there’s the possibility of getting poked in the eye with a woody twig! Keep raking the leaves off the lawn as they fall from the trees, and pull out dead growth from plants to stop the leaves rotting. Plant bulbs in abundance – in their hundreds! Cut back roses with a good sharp pair of secateurs. All straggly growth can go and don’t be scared of pruning them really hard. I have cut ten foot roses down to two inches. It did them the world of good. Prune roses with a diagonal cut, just above a bud on the stem – that little pink full stop. Cut out really skinny stems completely.

Make sure the buds are pointing outwards if you can. That way, the rose will send out new shoots from the pink bud, and they’ll grow outwards and keep the centre of the bush open for the sunshine to reach. It’s all common sense really. If you’re not sure what to do, just trust your instincts. It’s hard to go terribly wrong in the garden. We’re not really a nation of shopkeepers. We’re gardeners.

What’s coming up in the garden this week. By Louisa Bell of City and Country Gardens

Design and construction

A job well done
We are having work carried out on the house. It’s really quite odd to be on the ‘other side’ of the work in progress.

Like most people, we sometimes have no idea how much these things cost. The building company broke their quote down in detail and we do the same with our construction quotations. We don’t do estimates, and I wouldn’t accept estimates from the building company either. You need to know what you’re in for right from the start. We all have a few savings or perhaps we’ve re-mortgaged to get some work done. Either way, it’s usually a finite budget for works to be carried out. We had a figure ‘in mind’, and it wasn’t the figure on the quotation. We didn’t know what to do, and I decided to wait and get another quote. The second company were very nice, but somehow they just weren’t as professional. Company A had all of their own trades, and knew the local structural engineer we wanted to use. The building regulation people were high on their list. Company B wanted us to get all the drawings done, and didn’t seem to think we’d need building regulations. They were very friendly and had clearly carried out this kind of work before, but their quotation came through as one sum, without any detail. We realised that the initial quotation was going to be the scary cost for the job.

Company B were less expensive, but we went with Company A. We had to wait for them too, but it has been worth it. The guys working on the house are great. They turn up every day on time, and as each trade is needed, they’ve been here. They have paid attention to detail and have matched all the other features on the house as they have built in walls and doors.

I have always known how important it is to our clients that we offer the whole service. We have every trade working with, or for us. To that end we can carry out every single aspect of a garden construction site. We have chosen each member of our staff very carefully and they are all valued members of our team.

As the builders put the finishing touches to our house, I can stand back and realise how our clients feel as their garden is completed. It’s very exciting.

Plants

A shade better
Plants are getting thin on the ground now. It’s easy in the summer. I’m spoilt for choice, but at this time of year, a newly flowering plant is a little treasure. I planted some hellebores back in the summer. I had forgotten about them really. I needed something to grow underneath our big old conker tree. It’s very shady and dry underneath there. I improved the soil, with bags of farmyard manure, and then planted shade tolerant groups. I put in foxgloves, ferns, trilliums, bergenias, japanese anemones and hellebores. All of them are white flowering varieties, as they will lighten up the dark space. None of them were flowering back in the summer when they were planted and I call this anticipation planting. You have to just imagine and wait – the true joy of gardening. I walked past the hellebores yesterday, and they were all scrunched up like Kleenex, the first white flowers emerging from the ground. I knelt down (all of my jeans have muddy knees) to look closely at these beautiful little white flowers who have been waiting patiently for this time to arrive. All shade-loving plants are a bonus, you don’t expect to see anything much flowering under a big tree. Under my apple tree are tiny white cyclamen (just buy them in pots from the nursery and put them straight in the ground) and they’ll be followed by primroses and then white trilliums. Who said shady sites are tricky?

Things to do

The cold snap
Be prepared for the frosty mornings. We had a couple of frosts last week. Of course, we’re over the Downs and this makes a big difference to the temperature. I have lived most of my life within the sight and sound of the sea and last year, having moved away north (well, six miles north) I had to scrape my car every morning. I didn’t know your fingers could get so cold. The frosts will really affect your garden. Green leaves will go black or brown. Tender things in the garden will succumb to the cold. Some plants, like bizzie lizzies, almost look like their stems are full of water don’t they? It’s no wonder they collapse as soon as it’s cold. Other tender things are used to growing in a hot climate. They grow beautifully in our summer months, but their indigenous state doesn’t resemble our cold winter days. It’s often the damp, rather than the cold, that gets plants in the end. If you have something special, you can wrap it around in hessian or straw to keep out the damp. Don’t walk on the grass during a frost. Your footprint will shatter the frozen grass like a bus shelter’s window and the grass will die.

If you have plants that are tender don’t cut them back too hard now. Leaving a bit of top growth will protect them through the winter months and you can cut them back harder before they start to grow in March as the temperature rises. Keep sweeping up your leaves, especially off the grass. Buy some warm cosy gloves and keep inspecting your garden. Somewhere, under the leaves, there are bulbs and beautiful things just waiting to emerge. Like this weeks hellebore. Little winter stars, making us cry ‘Oh!’…

What’s coming up in the garden this week. By Louisa Bell of City and Country Gardens

Design and construction

The gardens of tomorrow
I think garden styles are diverging. The garden trend is towards ‘outdoor rooms’ yet it’s impossible to make a natural and wild garden into a pristine area. Outdoor rooms can only pay homage to a similar room indoors, for the wind and rain will always create dust and blow in leaves. The house can be hoovered and dusted and look fairly pristine for a couple of days. Windows and doors are closed against the weather, but outdoors there’s no hiding place. Still, we try.

We are just building a large projector screen wall for a client so that films can be shown outdoors throughout the summer, and I think this is the way that garden designers will try to go in the future. Indoors outdoors. New outdoor furniture, even from safe old Marks and Sparks, is weatherproof, rot proof and waterproof. Sofas and armchairs can stay out all winter and it’s a better bet than the wooden tables that need oiling or staining every season. However, I think it will become increasingly difficult for us to build gardens as a room that successfully emulates an indoor space.

We can provide rugs for outdoor use that look good all through any rain storm, lighting adds the illusion of home from home and speakers provide music for a party atmosphere. But… it’s still outdoors. At any moment the sky could darken. There’s no heating to turn up and make it cosy.

On the other hand, there’s the traditional garden and gardener and we find this amongst the younger generation too. This is a group of folk with wellies that are green and covered in mud – no pink Hunters for them. This true gardener wants to grow vegetables and nurtures some deeply felt instinct to be part of nature. Sowing seeds, taking cuttings, coaxing small emerging plants into life – this is part of some huge plan to keep the world turning. No outdoor sofa can replace this inner meaning. There are still two camps. Clients may say they want a mix of traditional and contemporary, but it really comes down to those who do garden, and those who don’t.

As climate change becomes fixed in our psyche and we find ourselves outdoors more and more throughout the summer months, the garden as part of our living space will continue to influence design and products. If you’re happy to go out in all weathers and love nothing more than taking your cuttings on a blowy Autumn day, then you probably already have a garden you love. If, on the other hand, you’re a fair weather gardener, you’re probably looking out onto a winter dreary garden already, with no change ahead for months. The non-gardeners need our help far more than the Percy Throwers of this world, but you’d be amazed how many sceptics have gone from garden hater to passionate plant lover. It’s not exactly the meaning of life, but it could be close.

Plants

Buxus sempervirens
It’s not politically correct to call these box balls anymore. Apparently, we have to call them spheres. Or so I’m told by the society of garden designers. You can imagine my response. Pick a word in the first sentence, and you’re there.

Buxus has been used for centuries and it’s such an obliging plant. I do feel sorry when it has its dignity removed and some wit clips it into a ridiculous shape. Our local nursery has had a full size carriage and team of horses, clipped out of box plants, for sale for years. At £5000 it’s a snip. Or quite a lot of snipping. Our wholesale nursery has a dolphin jumping through a hoop, and another clipped novelty, a helicopter. Why? As my teenage son would say about my cooking “It’s just wrong”. Low box hedges give form and structure to a detailed plant area and it’s a brilliant plant for crossing the boundary between contemporary and traditional. I like the squares to use as ‘full stops’ at the end of borders.

The defined shapes add an anchor point so that more ‘blowsy’ plants can be used in groups. Add a clipped box, and the whole border looks ordered. Buxus is used to edge ‘knot gardens’ – the patterned, hedge-edged flower beds in stately homes – but it also looks great on its own in a pot. The pyramid shapes are a little more contrived, and should be used carefully. Squares and sphere balls can be used less sparingly. Every garden should have one. Or two.

Things to do

Bring it on home
This is a good time to pot up little tender treasures from the garden and bring them indoors for the winter. Plants that have stopped flowering will respond really well to a feed, a water and a bit of warmth. You can keep geraniums going on a sunny windowsill, or better still – pot up some of the herbs in the garden and bring them indoors too. Basil, parsley, rosemary, thyme – all the usual suspects – will be quite happy in the warmth of the house and will send up new growth to keep your spag bol tasting almost Italian throughout the winter months. Buy some old terracotta pots, as they make any plant look wonderful. The little pansies – violas – are in the nurseries now, and putting half a dozen into one pot will produce such a pretty display. They have such cheerful little faces.

If you’re hard up, and worrying about Christmas presents, buy some bulbs – hyacinths or narcissi – paper white is a good variety for this – and plant the bulbs for a lovely thoughtful present. Plant the bulbs with their noses showing and put the pot into the dark. Once the leaves are showing at the top of the bulb, bring it into the light but keep it cold. You can then add your own choice of personal decoration.

For all the things in your garden, talk to us!
City and Country Gardens
01273 202115 / 01903 892285
www.city-gardens.net