by James Alexander-Sinclair
I've been busy redesigning a great chunk of my garden. It's an important area, overlooked by our kitchen and bedroom windows so it's the first thing I see every morning when I stagger out of bed.
I've been busy redesigning a great chunk of my garden. It's an important area, overlooked by our kitchen and bedroom windows, so it's the first thing I see every morning when I stagger out of bed. In contrast to the rest of the garden, it's always been quite formal.
I initially laid it out about ten years ago, based on a pattern I found in a picture of some pierced stonework in a palace in India. It formed a lattice of little paths around a central brick pond and fountain. But the timber edgings have now rotted away and the bricks on the pond crumbled to dust. I replaced the pond a couple of years ago with a more modern arrangement, a sort of cross between a pipe organ and a tower block made from randomly sized square metal tubes. It's always looked a little alien, so I've decided that this year I really ought to finish it off. Some of the tubes need copper tops and it also needs a focal point, some sort of central bowl from which the water will overflow.
I also felt that the time had come for a bit of a change, so I redesigned the area, based on a pair of flannel pyjamas I had when I was a boy. They had unevenly spaced stripes and I thought it would be interesting to replicate that idea in the garden. So, last month, Mike, Baz and Patrick appeared and made pretty short work of demolishing the existing garden. It then snowed. So this is the first week it's been dry enough to get back to things, and it's been a week of much effort. I uploaded pictures to Flickr on a daily basis, starting here with the original layout and ending here with its new stripy look.
All we need now are some plants.
But which plants? I managed to salvage some box, a shedload of Crocosmia 'Lucifer', buckets of rapidly sprouting Nectaroscordum siculum and a few anemones, so the first step is to find a place for them. I hope to plant two or three different plants in each stripe so that there's some sort of succession through the summer. We've always had lots of Verbena bonariensis, so I'll probably fit some in, but I'm still thinking of other things. Some kniphofia, maybe. Definitely some grass: perhaps a Panicum 'Heavy Metal'?
So many choices. Any suggestions welcome.
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