Michael Cooke has been working with plants since he was 11. No wonder his garden is excellent!
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Here's a little inspiration to transform your outdoor space (or even just get started gardening).
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The Planting Design PPN, chartered in 2012 in response to ASLA members’ interest in the subject, creates many opportunities for examining the area of planting design and horticultural select…
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No NGS garden this weekend, so I had chance to catchup with my garden and try to tame my vegetable plot. I made the mistake of letting some potatoes grow, instead of oiking them out, when they first protruded from the soil. They were potatoes which had been left in the ground from last years crop. I felt bad digging them up but didn't estimate how much room they would take up. Consequently, they smothered my lettuces, french marigolds and tomatoes and when I had finally had enough of them and dug them up, the measly few potatoes they yielded, were green, as they were too close to the surface! Also I made the mistake of sowing too many tomatoes and I am finding it difficult to find a space for them. I absolutely hate throwing plants away, especially if I have grown them from seed, so I will have to shoehorn them in somewhere. And there is my next mistake. I put plant in too close together. Oh my goodness I don't think my veg plot is going very well this year! Runner Bean 'Painted Lady' I have had some success in the flower garden though but I won't take all the credit. I had a patch of grass, on which I put plastic last year so that I had somewhere to grow butternut squash, in grow bags and this was going to be my veg patch, until my best friend Linda, suggested that I would be better growing flowers there and to save the veggies to the top of the garden, which I did. We removed the turf, which was pretty much dead anyway and stored it in a space, to rot down to loam. (You will see from the photograph below, that there is horrible green plastic still covering the turfs) I moved some plants which I had in the garden, to the new bed and with space it meant buying some more plants. Some women like shoes and handbags, but I cannot resist a gorgeous flower and I get great pleasure from buying plants - ooh it's such a lovely feeling! We then purchased two tonnes of Scottish pebbles from StoneZone in Ferndown in Dorset, which cost an arm and a leg but well worth the effort and expense, although back breaking work, with Andy shovelling the stones into the wheelbarrow, pushing it up the drive and then depositing them for me to put around the plants. Work in progress Lavender Vera I love visiting garden centres and from one of my local garden centres Stewarts in Ferndown, I bought this lovely willow heart wreath, to go on my studio door. I love bits and bobs in the garden and I am excited as I have purchased a new book from Amazon called Shed Chic. I want to overhaul my summer house and this book looks very inspirational. Is anyone every satisfied with their garden? At the beginning of the season I had high hopes for my veg garden. It might still come good. The peas, beans and runner beans are all looking good but I still have a lot to learn, still with my companion by my side, although he is not much help, gardening is always a pleasure and never a chore. Boots my gardening companion
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Guarda le foto del giardino inglese della Batcombe House di Libby Russel, diviso in due parti: una dedicata agli alberi da frutto l’altro dedicato a un paesaggio bucolico che riecheggia quello circostante
Now that we’ve finally gotten some rain again here in southeastern Pennsylvania, I decided to plant out a few pansies. Yeah, no–just kidding, obviously. But this is part of the spring t…
Thoughts about our garden. “We desire,” the Emporer dictated, “that in the garden there should be all kinds of plants.” Charlemagne the Great I do a lot of writing about gardens, but our own personal garden has never been the subject of this blog. Our garden is always a backdrop to my thinking about gardens and gardening—a sort of character in my story whose face is never revealed. There are many reasons for this: first, our garden is just in the process of being established; I’m a terrible photographer and our garden is surrounded on three sides by unattractive roads and on one side by our unattractive house; and mostly because the act of gardening feels profoundly personal to me. It was designed for us, for our own pleasure, so the idea of opening for public consumption is a bit terrifying to me. BEFORE: The garden area when we bought the house. But I love other blogs that openly share their own gardens. James Golden’s View from Federal Twist is a brilliant blog about two wonderful gardens. That James bears his own soul through the garden is a source of endless inspiration to me. I’m just not that brave. And Scott Weber’s Rhone Street Garden is another fantastic blog. Scott transforms his small garden into and endless expanse through the lens of his camera. Through his images, I see and enjoy Scott’s garden much in the way he probably does. Nasella tenuissima and Salvia 'Caradonna' So in homage to other bloggers who bravely open their own gardens to public scrutiny, I am adding a few images of our own “in-process” garden. This spring marks two full years since I began smothering a triangular wedge of lawn in our sunny side yard. This area was too small to be a usable lawn, and too close to the road to be an enjoyable outdoor use area, so it seemed like a practical area for a garden. The sipping terrace which my brother-in-law calls the "duck blind" in late summer The house we bought was a neglected mid-century ranch which we essentially gutted, so my wife and I have poured our resources and time into renovating the house room by room. The only way to afford the renovation was to do everything ourselves, so that has left little time and money for the garden. The assembly of plants—and assembly is a much more accurate term than design—is a result of what we could get cheaply, what we could divide, what was available, and what would survive the mid-summer heat and humidity. This approach is probably entirely familiar to most gardeners, yet entirely problematic from my point of view as a designer. The garden becomes a product of impulse purchases and ad hoc decisions, not careful planning. Kniphofia 'Salley's Comet' with Pleioblastus viridistriatus, Nepeta "Walker's Low' and Eschscholzia californica But I’ve decided to embrace this non-designed approach. Design has its limitations, too. Any designer who has ever installed a garden, walked away, and then visited that garden five years later learns that design is not a singular vision set to paper; design is a thousand of little decisions and actions made through the life of the garden. Iris 'Persian Berry', one of the most exquisite colors I've ever seen With no real design to speak of, the garden has only a sort of guiding philosophy: plant only that which gives us pleasure. To use an admittedly pretentious term, our garden is a sort of “pleasaunce” by default, an archaic term for pleasure-garden. The concept of a pleasure garden is a bit antiquated these days. We are now much more likely to call non-food bearing gardens ornamental gardens. But “ornamental” is such a poor descriptive phrase. Who picks plants like they would pick wallpaper? To match their exterior trim? The worst gardens are those that aim to be merely decorative. No, we pick plants to live with us because they give us pleasure. I was recently re-acquainted with the idea of pleasure gardens when I re-read one of my favorite garden books, Rose Standish Nichols’ English Pleasure Gardens. It is a book I often pick up, read a chapter, and then put it away for a while. This century-old book is a compelling story of the English garden as viewed through three centuries of garden history. Throughout the book, one theme keeps emerging throughout the millennia: gardens exist for our pleasure. Christopher Lloyd’s writings have also been an inspiration of late. Perhaps I’ve spent too many years designing gardens, too many years of balancing client’s desires with safe plant selections. I love the almost garish quality of Dixter’s Long Border. The way it thumbs its nose at “tasteful” gray, pink, and blue color harmonies. The way it mixes tropicals, shrubs, perennials into one boisterous expression. Like Dixter, I would love a garden dedicated to nothing but horticultural craftsmanship. ''Beware of harboring too many plants in your garden of which the adjectives graceful and charming perpetually spring to your besotted lips,'' Lloyd warns as he clutches a black-leafed Canna. I love that. Dixter’s great triumph (and perhaps its downfall) is that it employs every tool in the planter’s toolkit all at once. The result is a hot mess, but one of the purest expressions of horticultural exuberance I’ve ever known. And what a joy that is. Cotinus 'Royal Purple' center (coppiced yearly), Savlia sclarea, Miscanthus 'Morning Light' and Alliums Perhaps all gardening is an attempt to re-create Eden, but our garden has absolutely no paradisiacal qualities. As a result of its placement next to an ugly house and an ugly road, we’ve adopted a more postlapsarian style. In the border, we have an ecumenical selection of wetland plants, desert grasses, South African bulbs, native forbs, and color foliage shrubs. Anything goes as long as it goes. The other side of our yard, we are beginning another more restrained garden evocative of a woodland edge. But in the border, there is no room for restraint, only more and more plants. Nasella tenuissima, Salvia 'Caradonna' and Allium 'Purple Sensation' In this blog, I am often guilty of heaping too much meaning on gardens, burying a simple act under too many metaphors. Perhaps it is an effort to justify my own profession, to add more significance to my calling than actually exists. If a garden exists simply for our own pleasure, what then? Perhaps that is enough. All I know is that gardening is hard work that reveals many agonies and few ecstasies. So despite the garden’s many flaws and failings, when the afternoon sun hits a patch of Feather grass and silhouettes the violet stems of Salvia ‘Caradonna’, it is enough for me. For now, I am pleased. Phlomis tuberosa and Hibiscus 'Fantasia' The ever ubiquitious, but entirely useful Spiraea 'Goldflamme' with Zahara Zinnias Our native-ish garden, planted this srping.
For a lavender enthusiast and landscape designer, crafting a wild and beautiful garden in one of the country’s most inhospitable environments was an expression of letting go. Words: Cheree Morrison Photos: Rachael McKenna This article was originally published in the March/April 2018 issue of NZ Life & Leisure. The Central Otago sky is a watercolour backdrop – and the plant palette in Karen Rhind’s Bannockburn garden makes up the ‘brushes’ that wash it with delicate hues: the fragrant tips of green bushels dipped in lavender and violet; ticklish grasses in shades of blonde, and olive trees thick with bristles of
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