Informal planting

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The RHS often asks for planting plans from designers of the show gardens at Chelsea, but I don’t know of any designer who actually produces one. You have a broad picture in your head, a few dazzling combos, and then you kind of make it up a bit on site.

The reason it doesn’t sound terribly scientific, is because it isn’t, and the first few days of planting are really exciting, as you discover combinations you hadn’t thought of before. Alternatively, the first few days are utterly terrifying, as you struggle to come up with an elusive winning formula! It can go either way.

I do like to do a bit of planning though, and I’ve developed a technique, which is a bit crude, but usually works. Basically, it’s like a collage of pictures stuck on a bit of paper, except I do it in Powerpoint on a computer. I cut and paste the same image of a plant several times, to create a drift, and then repeat that drift a few times on the same page. Then I add more drifts of plants, so I can get a good idea of what it will look like, from a distance, in terms of texture and overall colour. 

At the beginning of designing this year’s garden, the idea was to create something like a meadow, with plants growing amongst each other and intermingled. But my cut and paste process doesn’t work well for this look, and I’ve ended up with quite clearly defined blocks of plants. 

So I’m now trying to disrupt the blocks, by throwing together Sanguisorba, with the tufted hair grass, Deschampsia cespitosa, as I think the claret-coloured flowerheads will dance through it nicely. And one of the cow parsley-like umbels would go well in the mix. I’m also growing the nettle-leaved bell flower, Campanula trachelium, which will work best poking up amongst its neighbours, and the white version of ragged robin, which would never be seen growing without pink companions in the wild.

And so the plan at the moment is to create pools of green within the colour. I’ll have Rodgersia, pheasant's tail grass, goats beard, ferns and Equisetum in large groups repeated around the garden, and then meadow drifts of intermingled loveliness in between. That’s the plan anyway. It could all end up quite differently of course.

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