Designer Jinny Blom offers advice on creating good planting schemes that suit their setting, using new examples from her own portfolio
PHOTOGRAPHS BRITT WILLOUGHBY DYER
Perhaps the most complicated aspect of making a garden is designing the planting. Every one of us approaches it in unique ways, and there is no right or wrong way of doing it. Designing planting involves having a good vision of how you’d ideally like things to look. This is the most brilliant bit about gardening – seeing how other people do it.
It is best to start with the structural elements of larger trees, hedges, topiary and shrubs, then the infilling of smaller plants can begin. This should take time to put together, with lots of mulling, leafing through books and catalogues. Internet scrolling is, of course, de rigueur these days, though I personally find books much easier to use and more informative. Given this is what I do for a living, and that people seem to like it, it’s probably more useful for me to discuss and deconstruct my own planting – see three examples on the following pages. I can then show how I go about responding to a place, demonstrating my own way of building up the story and showing the end results.
Garden planting that can semi-naturalise a space is my personal preference. It seems to give a relaxed quality that I enjoy. Some say it’s ‘messy’, and perhaps it is, although this is – like most things in gardening – a subjective view and bothers me little. Gardens are not the best places for being judgemental; that gift is best left at the door.
Gardens are to be enjoyed exactly for their uniqueness. Having always had a very strong affinity with nature, I’ve looked a lot at how plant matrices work in the wild. There are wonderful sporadic outbursts and then quieter areas where more jewel-like plants emerge to surprise us.
Once, driving across grasslands in Africa, I screeched to a halt. There, in the vast acreage of grass, shone a pyjama lily, Crinum macowanii. This great, voluptuous, pink amaryllis with its rich-green, fleshy leaves looked incongruous in a vast savannah of dried tawny grass. But that’s nature. It’s probably still there, looking and smelling gorgeous, to attract a sexy beast.
I find it possible to get a sense of order into a garden through the built structure and the structural planting, so my gardens are highly civilised. I am not trying to emulate nature. I am making a garden and using ‘garden’ plants – namely those we have tried and trusted – to paint a picture of something loose and relaxed. ■
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