When I started writing this blog, as the snowdrops appeared, I thought I could cover all of what I have done so far, plant-wise, in one blog – but I can’t. There’s too much to say, so I need to divide it into a few.

This one is about the theory and Commandments of major planting decisions plus the “feel” I want to create: colours, textures, shapes, sizes etc..

The planting plans

On the planning side, certain things were a given – tall plants like trees and large shrubs (both of which I love) have to be restricted to the sides of the garden so they don’t disrupt the view from the kitchen and terrace across the landscaped fields, magnificent oaks and general beauty that stretches out for miles at the end of the garden with only one, very grand, house in sight.

Obviously the rose arch parade will be tall and have lots of climbing roses and other climbers such as Wisteria, Lonicera (honeysuckle) and Clematis, but it has been designed not to obstruct the view from the kitchen French windows and to be seen through/down from the window above the sink. Yes, the garden design plan is that detailed!

And the shadier parts of the garden, mostly closer to the house and terrace, will need plants that can cope with less sun and that also can’t be too tall or they’ll obstruct the view.

Colours and textures

I now have created lots of beds to plant and, honestly, it’s a bit daunting. I have never had so much space to plant in.

On the colour front, in theory, I love all the colours. Some people ban red, orange and bright yellow from their gardens, often because they find them hard to work with. But I love the brighter colours as much as the paler ones. I find they are particularly good in late summer and autumn (think Rudbeckia, Helenium, Canna, Dahlia etc), and am determined to have lots of everything.

But where to put them?

In London I had the simplicity of two major beds to work with. I made one for cooler colours (blues, purples, whites, pinks, very pale yellows) and the other was my ‘hot’ bed, filled with oranges, reds, deep yellows, and purples – the other side of the colour spectrum and path – and they worked very well opposite each other, even in a small space (as shown below).

Great borders in “proper” gardens (by which I mean grand, well planned or famous ones) sometimes manage to work all of these colours into one border. And I sort of see achieving this as one of my challenges here. I have two relatively large/long beds in which I plan to allow colour across the spectrum. The first is what is now called, rather too grandly, the ‘Long Border’. It runs from near the terrace to the pond, adjacent to the lawn and to the left of the rose arches. It is x metres long and a metre wide. The beds I am now planting from scratch are detailed below.

The second large planting area is the much-enlarged left bed, now named the ‘Kennett’ border, behind the new shed, which incorporates the peninsula ‘bulge’ into the lawn.

The ‘vegetable’ garden area to the East of the main path will not just be veg.. It will also be a cutting flower garden and I plan to grow sweet peas and Dahlias here alongside beans, salad leaves, beetroot, rainbow chard etc- so the colours will anyway be a bonkers mix. I am hoping it’s going to get enough sun for all these because part of it has quite a high East fence, all of it has the rose arch parade to the West and it has the greenhouse to the South – gulp! Previously it had a greenhouse and shed to the South and still grew fruit etc successfully, so fingers crossed.

Thus I think some serenity, some colour calm, is needed elsewhere. I have four other good-sized beds to plant and four smaller ones, a number being shade beds, plus the raised wall beds. White is always a good colour in the shade and evening and my North facing beds in both my previous homes were pretty lush, with even roses doing well. I feel the four larger beds will all need more restricted colour schemes – pinks, blues and whites in some and yellows, greens and whites with flashes of red in another etc..

The colour and texture of foliage, bark and flowers, shapes and heights, become very much more important at this stage. For instance I haven’t even thought about under-planting at the moment. It’s all about big decisions – trees, major shrubs, flowering seasons, colours and textures.

Some time back I sketched a very loose, wax crayon plan of what I want the Kennett bed to look and feel like with plant ideas.

I am very embarrassed to share this awfully bad drawing with you but I am showing you the reality of my planning ie I tend to combine “to the millimetre” hard landscaping design (which you’ve seen) with very much more loose, creative planting plans based around some key plants I want to grow, the colours, forms and textures so I can ‘feel’ visually (if that makes any sense) what it might will look like some years down the line.

Scent

I am obsessed by scent. I want this garden to smell glorious, all year. Scent also brings in all sorts of pollinating insects so lots of decisions will be based on smell as well as everything else.

Capturing scent is trickier here because it’s quite windy and I need to keep the end of the garden open for the views so ‘trapping the scent’ will be tough. An on-going project!

The Commandments of plant selection

As I am sure you know, if you want your garden to thrive it means adhering to a few basic rules – “right plant, right place, right soil” being my First Commandment (the official one is right plant, right place). In my book there are three (and soil gets added to the first) - see below for the other two.

Although there are many notable exceptions, it’s usually a good idea to try to plant plants where they will thrive best. Seems obvious when you think about it so it really annoys me that garden centres and plant producers/labellers don’t usually give enough detail. We have to research a bit more. OK, of course you first read the label. It’s a good start but label planting information varies dramatically and can just be symbols about sun etc.. More often than not, especially in garden centres, the label will not tell you which soil a plant likes. You are expected to know. So if you don’t, ask – or check it out on your handheld. Never walk out of any nursery or garden centre without knowing what your plant needs to thrive. It can be a huge waste of money.

And don’t worry about not knowing. Researching, asking and talking is how we all learn and get better at it. And anyone who knows more than you do will love to tell you – I know I do! To the huge embarrassment of my friends and family, I am forever butting into the conversations of complete strangers in gardens and garden centres and advising them on things I think I know lots about. They are often very surprised but usually grateful. I have even done it across tables in restaurants when I have ear-wigged a planting question with a poor answer. Let’s face it, I’m a plant menace because my enthusiasm for them knows almost no bounds. To be fair, if someone does it to me I love it too. Growing plants is all about sharing ideas and experiences – often with complete strangers. We should all talk more.

I digress. Back to selecting plants.

 It’s also useful to know where plants are native to and what their natural habitat is or was and how they might look/develop – the Second Commandment. The “history” of plants is easy to research in books or online and gives you many more detailed clues as to where to plant them. For example, even if they come from the tropics, but really high up in the mountains where it’s much colder and the soil is thinner, they can do well in a temperate environment like ours if in a similar soil. Some are natural to woodland so grow well under trees or in the shade, others need open vistas, rocky ground and lots of sun etc..

Their Latin name can sometimes help you here too. I am a great believer in Latin names. They often explain so much about a plant and it means that all of us, all over the world, can talk to each other about them - common names of plants are different everywhere. We often have two or three common names per plant, per country/language, let alone all over the world.

One of the very important Latin terms to know is foetidus/a/um or foetidissimus /a/um which all mean foul smelling! But there are a great many others, easy ones, even in the Fs, eg Floribunda (free flowering), flore-pleno (double flowers), flavus (pure yellow), fluvialis (growing in running water) and fragrantissimus (very fragrant).

If, like me, your Latin was never great (I scraped a B at ‘O’ Level) and you are not a trained horticulturalist, there is an RHS book called ‘Latin for Gardeners’ which won a Garden Media Guild award in 2013 and you can get it here. It’s a useful and informative reference work. My major criticism of it is that the type size is tiny and it’s printed in a grey on coloured stock so most people over 40 (the majority of gardeners) will need their reading specs or a magnifying glass to read it – not the most relaxing way to enjoy a book or to learn.

Having been a ‘suit’ in graphic design for over ten years it upsets me that somehow the designer/typographer or financier/publisher took over the project from the author (Lorraine Harrison) and produced something that doesn’t meet the brief as well as it could have. I assert that the design fails to meets the needs of the majority of its potential target audience and does disfavour to its creator.

That bug bear dealt with, I have only learned the Latin names of everything because I started my gardening and love of plants in the (easily readable) RHS Encyclopaedia of Plants and Flowers (text printed in a reasonable type size, in black on shiny white) - so I had no choice. I didn’t even think about it and knew no different - that was simply what they were called. Mine was the third edition (1999), a fine book and my bible. I understand it has been re-published recently and comments I’ve heard are not favourable. I’m not sure why, so I need to see it to judge and shall seek a copy. Watch this space!

Soil

The key things about soil are pH (acidity/alkalinity), structure, food and water supply, depth and drainage. As you know I have worked hard (well Dermot, Chris 1 and Syd the digger have worked hard and I have spent loads) to build organic matter into the clay which will help with structure, depth, food supply and drainage. But we are in a dip here and the water table is often not far from the surface – hence the drains under the lawn etc., and despite all these efforts, most of the newly improved soil is seriously claggy (descriptive not technical term) at the moment. At least there are now a gazillion worms from the horse manure to keep it as open as possible.

The Kimmeridge clay is pH6. The horse manure is pH6.5 and the ‘black gold’ compost is pH6. So the final result is pH6 across the beds - just the acid side of neutral. This might seem detailed but it’s the difference between whether acid lovers such as Rhododendrons, Azaleas, heather and Magnolia etc or lime lovers such Ceanothus, Clematis and Lavandula will thrive better. Certainly neighbours are growing heathers and Magnolia successfully in the ground and I see this as a remit to try to grow almost anything except those plants that need the extremes of pH.

By the way, if you have never tested your soil pH, do it now. It’s really easy. Garden centres sell cheap pH testing kits and you just put a bit of lower soil into a tube, add some water and wait to see what colour it turns. However, you should test using rainwater and test more than one part of your garden because it’s amazing how pH can vary, even in a small garden, and obviously the test is affected by the pH of the water from your local water supplier. Because I am testing so many areas I have invested (all of £10) in a pH prod meter rather than eight or more disposable test tube testers.

And whatever the pH, I have to assume that, despite all the organic matter I have built in to 60 cms+, lower down the clay will be hard and cracking in summer and wet/waterlogged in winter - a tough environment for the roots of many plants.

The ‘new’ soil is also pretty rich in nutrients. This will be good for many plants but too rich for those that thrive in poor or sandy soils. Also too much nitrogen encourages green, leaf growth rather than flowers in some plants like Nasturtiums and Wisteria, so I need to be careful.

As a result, I have built terrace walls with raised, severely drained beds, have not enriched one ground bed – it’s mostly scraped off topsoil from the old veg. garden - and am building a rockery just so I can grow plants that like different conditions from the normal beds. I have also built a raised vegetable bed for lettuces, beets etc not least because I’ll never get a fine tilth for seed planting on this claggy soil.

Sun, shade and wind

Hours of sunlight can be important for many plants, especially those bearing conspicuous flowers. I have now witnessed my new North-facing garden in midsummer, autumn and winter. In summer all but a tiny bit of it (miraculously) gets lots of sun for much of the day but in winter the sun is restricted to the far half. However, it does depend how tall the plant is – the higher up, the more sun they get. And now, in March, the sun is already higher and most of the beds are getting at least a few hours of sunshine each day – so I am treating it as ‘light’ shade.

The left side, obviously, is East facing in this hemisphere (yes we have readers south of the equator), so gets the morning sun. Lots of less hardy plants (plus some Acers, officially Camellias etc) don’t like morning sun after a cold night because they get frost/sun burned. West facing (ie the right side here) is a more gentle position for them. But wind can ‘burn’ lots of plants too and it’s quite windy here, especially on the West facing side, so my planting decisions are tricky, especially for my Acers and Camelias which have arrived in pots from London.

Be nosy and observant. This is the final and third commandment - check out everyone else’s garden and the environs. I have now managed to visit almost all the back gardens along this track (seven in all) so have been able to see what plants thrive in similar conditions and been able to ask about what doesn’t – all very helpful.

Seeing what grows well in the countryside around can be very helpful too. This area if full of Quercus (oaks), Salix (Willows) and Cornus (dogwoods) and hawthorn/brambles, all of which can cope with wet soil and it is now awash with snowdrops and early daffodils.

(Pics of oaks and dogwood locally?)

So commandments known, I set out to buy trees, shrubs, roses, climbers, perennials, annuals, veg seeds etc.. The next blogs cover my purchasing decisions.

But be aware, the fact that I now have a 100 year old rhubarb plant in my veg bed, donated by a neighbour - and I didn’t plan to grow rhubarb - is testament to the fact that, despite all my plans and the Commandments, I make emotional as well as logical decisions when it comes to plants and planting. I am now cramming learning on growing rhubarb.

Meanwhile the video shows the hard landscaping development – again. We’re nearly there! At least I have a greenhouse I am planting seeds in. Hooray!