Design and construction

The traditional seasons

Sad but true: the evenings are drawing in again. We have eight seasons really and we are just coming into ‘late summer’. You can feel it in the air – there’s a perceptible change. Even the sound of things in the distance is different. Listen to planes and cars – they echo with a melancholy feel as summer goes into this next phase.

There’s no longer the fresh green growth of plants – they’re all well into ‘doing their bit’ by now and ready to provide us with food, fruit, vegetables and the result of their flowers through the summer, their seed pods and seed heads. It’s a wonderful rite of passage.

This is where the contemporary garden comes into its own. White painted walls and structural planting will still look as good now as it did back in May. There’s almost nothing to demonstrate the changing year. The leaves are still green and architectural. The walls are still white and clean.

The cottage garden, in stark contrast, is a real give away that summer is at its height. The first flowers are over and the colours have changed from blues and pinks to reds, oranges and yellows. The plants that will take us well into the autumn – verbena bonariensis, rudbeckia, sunflowers – are all flowering now.

It’s really important to keep the structure of your garden looking good all year round so that you don’t get the feeling that it’s all over now. If you have a garden that consists of lawn and borders then this time of year will feel miserable. You start to cut back plants that have grown enormous over the summer, and the lawn is turning brown.

If you have well-planned and designed hard landscaping, it makes such a difference all year round – but especially now, when the plants are no longer doing it for you. Proper paths, well constructed terraces, pergolas or walkways: they stand alone regardless of the season.  

There was a gardening ‘competition’ at a local garden centre recently. Photos of people’s gardens were pinned up onto large boards. It’s so interesting to see what makes a garden and, for most people, it’s a lawn and borders of flowers, pots and hanging baskets. You could almost look at photos from the 70s and these gardens wouldn’t have changed at all. Huge begonias in brilliant oranges blancmanged over orange-brown plastic urns.

This, to me, is not a garden. Plants are important, and I love my plants, but a garden is a well-constructed, designed and thought out space with paths, terraces, upright sections and edged borders and lawns. It looks good all year round and has a continued structure. Please don’t show me the plastic brown pots in winter. That’s not a garden.


Plants

Late night colour

If you have white plants in the garden, you will have seen the phosphorescent feel they give as the day draws to a close. Out in the gathering dusk, as a blackbird flies chit-chatting across the garden, you can see the white flowers glow.

White climbing roses are the best. If you grow them up a tree, and they cascade down from the top (nature at her very best) you can see the roses in the gloom like tiny spectres. I love white arum lilies – they are amazing plants because they will grow in a sunny border or in a pot or pond. Like an Englishman, they cope with being hot or soaked! I have grown them in huge pots standing in a long water feature and that worked wonderfully. In the winter you can lift out the pots – whilst the flowers recover for next year – and drop them back in, come spring.

Some plants are a creamy white – like magnolia grandiflora. This is another stunner, for the flowers are huge – like tea plates – and it flowers in the summer so the blooms don’t get frost-damaged like early magnolias. They are scented too – like gardenias dipped in lemons.

Another favourite white climber is solanum jasminoides album – white flowers with yellow centres – and this is a climber that goes mad! It scrambles over anything and keeps going right into the first frosts. Its common name is ‘Mexican potato plant’, and you can see that the flowers are the same as potato flowers. Somebody must have planned all this!

Things to do

Hanging baskets and pots

If your baskets and pots look tired now, then you can cut them back and start again. It’s hard to keep dead-heading the plants, but that’s what keeps them going. You’ve fooled them into thinking they haven’t produced enough seed yet, and they keep producing flowers.

Get a pair of scissors or secateurs and cut all the plants back. Give them a really good water – the rain doesn’t really soak pots – and feed them every week. Tomato feed will be best. Water the pots really well first and then dilute the feed and water them again. Give it a couple of weeks and they’ll start to grow well again, and the next flush of flowers should take you into October.
Keep things like hostas in pots too, as the slugs and snails won’t be so keen to eat them. Put some Vaseline around the pot and see if that puts them off. Add containers of other evergreens and small shrubs and this keeps your pot collection going into the winter too.

Nurseries are selling off their bedding plants at the moment, and this is a great time to buy up geraniums and bizzie lizzies. The spent flowers may look miserable, but cut them back hard and feed them, and you’ll be amazed how wonderful they’ll look in a couple of weeks. If you have a sunny windowsill indoors, geraniums in oldfashioned terracotta pots look lovely. I keep mine flowering right the way through the winter. It’s like summer inside the window.