The question of what to grow this year has Nigel Slater thinking back on past failures and hoping wildly for the future
My plans, it turned out, were naïve. My small, thin box of a garden was to have a simple palette of dark-green bones with occasional flashes of white. The ‘bones’ were yew, ivy and hornbeam. The white flashes were to be Ammi majus, cosmos and roses. I ordered an avalanche of snow-white brunnera, some climbing roses and a pair of white Paeonia rockii from a trusted specialist, and waited.
My careful plans started to unravel as soon as some of those white brunnera turned out to be blue and the roses sported distinctly yellow buds before the white petals unfolded. To rub salt into the wound, the peonies took three years to flower and their four voluptuous, ball-gown blossoms showed up as a rather loud magenta. The white garden was clearly beyond this amateur gardener.
I moved on, slightly embarrassed, to an early summer palette of apricot, orange and deep wine-red. The introduction of colour was going well until I was seduced by pink roses with names as sweet as their perfume and realised I had also inherited my father’s love of carnival-coloured dahlias; a mixture that even in the most careful of horticultural hands could look like a nursery school’s playroom. Getting colour right (whatever that may mean) is somehow more crucial in a small garden because there are no corners to turn. Your eye has no choice but to take in the entire garden, successes and mistakes, in one glance.
The brick walls of the house are painted a rusty orange, which would be the perfect backdrop for burgundy-petalled Rosa ‘Souvenir du Docteur Jamain’ and Dahlia ‘Chat Noir’. Yet I remain in a constant dilemma about how far to go with introducing colour into what is a rather uptight garden.
‘Apricot, white, deep wine-red’ has become something of a personal garden mantra, but also a belt that feels tighter by the year; but then, don’t they all? Should this be the summer I let in a little yellow or purple, already so successful in spring? Perhaps in the form of Achillea filipendulina ‘Gold Plate’ or the nostalgic Aster x frikartii ‘Mönch’. Sadly, the sight of purple and yellow within six feet of each other makes this gardener queasy. I am now leaning in the direction of the richer ochre and purple tones of Achillea ‘Inca Gold’ and Aster amellus ‘King George’. But still I worry.
I am learning that the colour choices that please and those that grate are often
