THIS WEEK AT GLEBE COTTAGE
The latest from Carol's beautiful cottage garden... plus her diary for the week!
Cultivate your imagination and consider all of the untapped potential your garden has to offer you through the year
Gardening needn’t be about maintaining the status quo and keeping everything ticking over in the same old way. To get the most out of it, sometimes it’s essential to close your eyes and give your imagination free rein.
Do you ever garden in your head? It’s an interesting exercise, digging up plants that are past their prime, rejuvenating them and putting them back refreshed and reinvigorated or taking everything out of a border and starting from scratch – and all without ever touching a spade!
Imagining what could be instead of accepting what exists is important in any gardener’s activity, and if it is tempered by practicality, then it can play an important role in the progress and vitality of all our gardens.
Dreaming is the first step but the process involves our gardening passion in full: design, choosing plants, their colour, form and personality, fitting them to our plots’ conditions and what we like, then marrying all this to the craft of gardening, propagating, planting and maintenance.
Because so much in our gardens is still dormant but just about to wake up at this time of year, there are great opportunities to undertake some major upheavals, to move plants, to dig and prepare the soil and to replant. This can be on any scale, big or small, depending on time, energy and inclination. It can be expensive, time-consuming and therefore frustrating to tackle the lot, but if we fit our plans to what we can afford both in time and money and think hard about what changes will make the most impact, our efforts will have the best effect.
Work out what you want from your new bed. Are you happy with its shape and how it is viewed? It might have always been looked at from one side but maybe that’s not the only way to see it? Perhaps, even in a small bed, there could be a path or a few stepping stones added so you can be involved with the plants and not just a dispassionate viewer? Maybe you could try wave planting with numbers of the same plant (easy to produce adequate numbers if you’re prepared to divide existing clumps) and get the plants to create movement within the bed? As well as height and bulk, think about contrasting leaf shape, colour and form.
To paraphrase the great, late Christopher Lloyd, all good ideas are worth copying, so look to other gardens for inspiration, from show gardens to one down your street, or a picture or photograph, a paint-chart or a favourite painting. The dimension in gardening which is most difficult to fathom is the fourth dimension: time. But you will be looking a
