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Planting for the future - By Lesley Hegarty and Robert Webber In the last of our special eight-part series following the design of a garden from scratch, the task ahead is to keep up the good work you startedIf you have been following our eight-part series you may have already created the perfect garden yourself or with the help of a garden designer.
 But you will also have found within the garden design process that, unlike other art forms, you need to deal with that all-important issue of time.
When your garden was first constructed and your borders newly planted two or three years ago, you had all the ingredients for a beautiful garden, but an as yet unfinished work of art. It is only after a few years that it begins to fulfil that early promise: the trees have added a bit of weight and height to the structure of the garden, the timber decking has weathered to a lovely shade of silvery grey and the borders have filled out to produce an exuberant array of colour and contrasting foliage textures.
You will also have ensured that your garden pleases all the senses – it’s the complete package - and we want it to stay like that forever!
How do we achieve that? We all know that time and the seasons march on and that our garden, which looks fantastic now, is an ever changing tapestry and will look different again in a couple of weeks’ time if we don’t look after it properly. One of our key questions to clients is how much time they are realistically prepared to spend maintaining their garden in order to keep it under control. Remember, there is more merit in spending one hour’s gardening per week than undertaking a once a month blitz – and putting your back out at the same time!
Here are a few practical tips. If you have herbaceous plants that are on the verge of outgrowing their space, for example, divide them into smaller clumps in the spring and replant. In midsummer you can also extend the flowering season of a good number of your plants if you deadhead the old blooms and watch them flower again, and in autumn you will need to tidy up your perennials that have gone over by cutting them right back and removing the dead stems. (If you can, do leave the attractive seed-heads for the birds to eat).
 The personal circumstances of our clients, Joe and Sophie, have certainly changed dramatically in the last few years: they now have two lively sons, Sophie has given up work for the time being and is extremely busy as a full-time mum, and Joe has gained promotion at work. Obviously this means less time for gardening, so Joe and Sophie asked us what they could do to keep their garden still looking great. We were able to revisit our original design for the garden and come up with an option that allowed them to increase the lawn area and reduce the border planting, while still maintaining the integrity of the initial design.
Just as time dictates that nothing stands still for very long, so too your garden will be a measure of your changing tastes.
Nowadays, when the return on our savings has diminished to a shadow of its former self, our garden, as a thing of beauty, is quite definitely still our best investment.
Lesley Hegarty and Robert Webber – www.hegartywebberpartnership.com – 01934 853273 |
