Savills Garden, Chelsea Flower Show 2007, designed by Marcus Barnett and Philip Nixon. Photo © Anna Barker

May means it’s time for Chelsea – the Flower Show, not the Football Club*. The first Royal Horticultural Society Spring Flower Show was held in 1888, not in Chelsea but in the three acre Inner Temple gardens in central London, surrounded by lawyers who were not impressed with the disruption – the wafts of soup from the catering stands proving particularly upsetting. Moving to the larger Royal Hospital, Chelsea in 1913, the show proved to be a tremendous success. For the 1914 show the organising committee wanted a suitable company to film the event – something we’re all too familiar with nowadays, with week-long wall to wall TV coverage.

In tough economic times Chelsea, as the show has become known, could be viewed as an extravagance. It takes 18 months’ time and effort to organise, and the cost of the major show gardens alone would turn your hair white. But Chelsea has almost always run, through both world wars and during times of depression. During straightened times the show has reflected the prevailing conditions – expensive and labour intensive hot-house plants virtually disappeared after 1918, and in the early 1930s vegetables and herb gardens were popular, as they were again in 2011.

But if you do go to Chelsea, and everyone should try to go once, you realise it’s like going to the theatre – complete artifice, perfect for a few days only. The show gardens are beautiful but if you could transport them home they wouldn’t be the same. From a design point of view, the show gardens as a whole are unattainable (unless you’re a lottery winner), but individual ideas can be gleaned and tweaked to work in your own gardens. The plants are fabulous, of course, and the passion and commitment of the exhibitors to plants and horticulture is amazing – you cannot help but feel inspired to make changes once you get home.

It could be argued that you’d get a better view if you watched the coverage on TV, and it would certainly be more comfortable. But there is a certain atmosphere at the show that you don’t get from sitting on the sofa. It’s busy, expensive, tiring, the weather is never perfect. But overall, the world’s most prestigious gardening event is just fabulous.

* Although at the time of writing Chelsea Football Club could still win the Champions League and the FA Cup. So I’m told.

This article originally appeared in Village Breeze Magazine, May 2012. © Lush Landscape and Garden Design Ltd 2012.

Source: http://FrugalDad.com

According to the old rhyme, we should be preparing ourselves for April showers. But these days who knows what type of weather we’ll get from one month to the next? Gone are the distant childhood memories of roasting hot summer holidays and snowy winters. It seems that wherever you live the chances of predictable weather are shifting, with each season slipping slightly into the next.

Whether this change is our doing or part of a natural cycle, one thing is for sure – we will have to adapt to survive and that applies to our gardening habits too.

This week, European forestry scientists started a huge study to assess the impact of climate change on forestry. Test plots of a wide variety of tree species are being planted, measured and assessed throughout Europe, with the measurements scheduled to continue for decades.

In the UK, water companies covering the South East and East Anglia have already declared hose-pipe bans due to draught conditions, and there is a real possibility of those bans being extended across the country, so we need to be prepared.

We’ve written before on how to deal with drought in the garden by conserving water using butts and choosing drought resistant plants. But I don’t think we should be worrying solely about drought – if climate change predictions are accurate we should also be wary of other extremes, such as flooding.

My approach is to look closely at the conditions in your garden, and make those conditions work for you by planting accordingly.

For example, if you have an area that fills up with water in the winter but dries out and starts to crack in summer, leaving your plants either drowning or gasping for water, then take advantage of those conditions by creating a bog garden.

Excavate the area and line with polythene sheeting or butyl pond liner. Refill with gravel and soil, maybe a few well placed rocks and cobbles, and plant with moisture-lovers such as ferns, Lysichiton, Hostas, Astillbe, Rodgersia and Rheum (Gunnera if you have lots of room), and water in well. These plants will thrive in a damp position and, by lining the area with polythene, you’ll have helped keep moisture around their roots through any dry periods.

Alternatively, if you have a hot, dry site, think Mediterranean. Herbs love poor soil, so you don’t necessarily need to improve it greatly. Grey-leaved plants like Lavender, Stachys, Santolina, Verbascum, Eryngium and Phlomis will also thrive on this type of site.

With a bit of forward planning and thought we can prepare our gardens for whatever weather comes our way.

An abridged version of this article first appeared in Village Breeze magazine, April 2012

The months of inactivity during autumn and winter allow us gardeners time to plan for the year to come. There are so many plants I’m looking forward to in the seasons ahead: the spiral fleshy leaves of Hostas as they shoot out the soil; Allium bulbs with their perfect globes of dense purple starry blooms; highly scented Hammamelis; fat Poppy flower heads waiting to burst open with their crinkled petals; velvety heads of roses in high summer; the drift of tall ornamental grass like Stipa gigantea in the summer breeze. All perfect highs for me and reasons why I love doing what I do.

Looking out at my own winter garden it takes a bit of vision to see what it will become. The structure is there, the architectural back-drop of shrubs and trees, but even so on a dull day it can be depressing to look out to a sea of brown and grey, especially as my chickens have been scratching around doing some gardening of their own.

We’ve invested plenty of hard work in our garden over the years so I know that by summer it will look at its finest. Gardens evolve over time and there are still areas that need attention, but I have a master plan so it will be done… eventually.

And a plan is the most important part of any garden scheme – whether it exists just in your head or as a detailed annotated drawing. It’s so tempting to buy plants on impulse at the garden centre, but planting without planning most often leads to an over-crowded garden lacking in proportion, containing sickly looking plants. A properly designed plan will save you time and money so that eventually, in the depths of another winter, you can feel that same flutter of anticipation about your own garden.

This article originally appeared in Village Breeze Magazine, March 2012. © Lush Landscape and Garden Design Ltd 2012.

Yes, it’s true. Here he is, helping out with a spot of office admin:

We’re not alone. In 2011 Dobbies Garden Centres reported year-on-year gnome sales were up 192%, and British manufacturer Solus claimed a 206% increase in sales of their Woodland Wilf range, whoever he is. He’s not a true gnome, for the motherland of the gnome is Germany, where the original ‘Gartenswerg’ were first produced by Philipp Griebel in Graeferoda, Thuringia.

The Germans take their gnome-ownership so seriously that in 1989, after the collapse of the Iron Curtain, when cheap eastern European imitations started arriving on the market, they were prevented from entering Germany by customs officers.

Gnome popularity comes and goes, but they have never really been loved by the world of garden design – they were famously banned from appearing in show gardens at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2009. So we hope our confession doesn’t see us shunned by our peers.

Luckily, for us gnome-owners, help is at hand. Utah State University is on top of the situation, and has made this small film, alerting us all to the dangers that can befall a garden infested by gnomes. Be thankful it’s not your tax dollars in action here:

Hello! Mind the paint on your way in because, as you might have noticed, we’ve had the decorators in. Gone is the Battleship Grey decor of the previous site, replaced with the classy tones of Antique Ivoire Blanc (or white, to you and me). In other words, we have a new website.

I should draw your attention to the smiling features of Your’s Truly on the homepage, which my husband has dubbed ‘the unacceptable face of garden design’. He also wishes to point out the new “scrolling Twitter Feed widget”, of which he’s unfathomably proud and which, as far as I can see, will enable stalkers to track my every move.

On a more serious note, the new website reflects some changes to the business which we’ve been working on for 2012.

The most important change is that, after four years of designing and building the vast majority of our gardens, from this year we are going ‘design only’. That means we will no longer be offering a landscaping service but will instead offer a project inspection service and maintain a list of trusted local contractors.

This decision means we can concentrate on our core specialism – garden design.

And on the garden design front, we’re also publicising a service we’ve run for some time without ever shouting about it – Design by Post. This will allow anyone wishing to commission us to do so wherever they are based, regardless of our location. In the past we’ve designed by post for customers in Wales and Yorkshire, but never thought of mentioning it on the web site! That’s now changed, and we hope to start some postal commissions shortly.

In the wake of our successful fixed-price plans offer (now concluded), this year has seen the busiest January we’ve ever had. We’re currently working on five separate design projects and two further design and build projects we committed to last year. We’ve also committed to 6 months’ garden writing in a local magazine, so here’s to being busy! Let’s hope it continues…

If you need us urgently, please call 01283 217941, or email info@lushgardendesign.co.uk

Having rested my writing arm during a few months well earned sabbatical I duly received the call that my prose was in demand once more. So in the bright sunshine of a Saturday afternoon I sat myself down, licked the end of my pencil, and got straight to it.

At about midnight, as I crossed the final T and dotted a stray I or two, my husband leaned over and read through my creation, which I’d tentatively headlined “February in the Garden” – not one of my better titles, I know, but it was getting late. Expecting the usual tutting about punctuation and the like I was shocked instead by a simple one line of literary criticism which would have cut any writer down to size.

“It’s going out in the March issue.”

A hurried read through confirmed my worst fear – none of it could be reworked into an article about gardening in March. So I wrote something Marchy, but to be honest my heart wasn’t really in it at 2 in the morning.

Tomorrow I’ll re-write the March article properly, but in the meantime here is The Article That Never Was (unless I dust it off for February 2013). Just imagine you’re reading it in February, in a village magazine, nestled between the article about tax advice and the ads for funeral plans and horse supplies. Enjoy!

——-

I have a picture of you in my mind as you sit reading: huddled up against the fire, you look up from the page to stare balefully through the window, where you’re greeted by three feet of snow piled up against the kerb.

Do I have psychic powers? Not at all – it’s just that whilst I’m sitting here in my shirt sleeves writing 400 brisk words on the subject of ‘mild winters’, it is odds-on that as soon as this magazine hits the streets we’ll be assaulted by arctic blizzards the like of which we haven’t seen since… well, last year.

After that terrible cold snap the seasons have kept us guessing again, and this year’s winter has been unseasonably mild – as much as 20° warmer at times. The widely varying temperatures are wreaking havoc in the garden. Last winter we saw usually hardy evergreens like phormium, privet, hebe and bay all killed off, while this winter our half-hardy salvias were flowering into December, and our daffodils are weeks ahead of schedule.

It’s tempting, when the weather is unusually warm, to think that spring is early and it’s time to get planting. But that’s a thought you should resist. Garden centres like nothing better than to see customers push their trolleys of spring bedding through the tills in February, because they know those same customers will be back in a few weeks once the frost has had a go at their purchases.

But there are things you can be doing in the garden. With little growth to disturb, paths can be cleaned, repaired or relaid, beds can be cleared and dug over, tools cleaned and sheds cleared. Now is the ideal time for pruning fruit trees, late-flowering shrubs, certain clematis and roses, and peach trees and nectarines should be treated for peach leaf curl. If you’re really organised, give your lawn mower a service before the spring.

February is really a month for planning. On a bright day, when the three foot drifts have melted, take a trip around your garden, notebook and pencil in hand, and consider what needs improving, reshaping or repositioning. Now is the time to indulge some new ideas – maybe a new planting scheme, or a pond or summer house. Whatever you do, plan now to help your garden evolve and you’ll reap the benefits through the summer, and hopefully for years to come.

I can’t believe the holidays are here again. Just this morning we finished typing some client emails so, bar one or two deliveries, we’re on vacation now until the New Year.

We’ve had an extremely busy twelve months. The year started off with my recovery from a broken foot, and predictions of global financial doom from practically everyone. But we persevered, and we’ve met some lovely clients for the first time whilst we’ve continued to work with some equally lovely existing ones. We’ve discovered some fantastic local suppliers who were willing to share their knowledge and skills to help us do what we do. And we’ve seen a wide range of behaviour, good and bad: from the clients who sent us home with a bag of gifts after we got so engrossed in planting their garden we hadn’t noticed night had fallen; to the clients who decided we didn’t need paying at all.

We’ve designed new things, like the parterre garden in Hulland, and we’ve brought in new services, like the Fixed-Price Plans which have kept us nicely busy this autumn, and are still available…

We are also saying goodbye to one of our trusted contractors, Dave Evans, who is moving with his family to Cornwall. Dave was one of the first contractors we met when we relocated to the east midlands, and without his skills, energy and enthusiasm I doubt we’d have had as successful a start as we did. Dave was responsible for the hard landscaping on a number of the gardens pictured on this site, and he was retained by many of our clients for subsequent work. So thank you Dave, and we wish you and your family lots of luck in your new home.

We’re hoping for a quiet Christmas break, and we’d like to wish you all a very merry Christmas, and a happy New Year.

We’ll leave you with our favourite picture of Dave, from the long hot summer of 2008…

Top photo credits: The Marmot, activescience

Hopefully you’ll have seen our link to the large garden we designed and built in Moira, Leicestershire last year. We went back this year with our little hand-held camera to take some reference video shots, and I thought you might like to see one.

The winter of 2010/11 was the worst for a generation, but it didn’t seem to have affected the new planting too much. We lost some Phormiums, Fatsias and Penstemons, but happily the rest survived unscathed.

We’ll be uploading more videos in the future – please subscribe to our YouTube Channel.