Last weekend I visited a client garden we first planted two years ago, and I’m pleased to report that it’s looking rather special.
We always take plenty of photos when we’re installing our planting schemes, and we’re sometimes asked why our initial planting looks a bit sparse, compared to the show gardens you see at Chelsea. If you compare our ‘just planted’ photo below with the same bed taken last week, the initial planting looks a little thin next to all that abundance. The answer comes down to one thing – time.
Planting for the garden it will become
A young plant needs room to settle into its new home and grow, so we install it spaced at its mature size, not its current size. A plant that’ll reach a metre wide goes in with a metre of space around it, even though it looks tiny and a touch lonely on the day it goes in the ground.
There’s good reason for this restraint. Young plants establish far more reliably than mature ones. Their roots are still finding their feet, and given space they spread out, anchor in and put on growth at a steady, healthy pace. Crowd them together and they spend their energy competing for the same light, water and air, which leaves them leggy, weak and prone to disease.
Give a plant room and it grows to its mature shape and size. The structure we visualise for you at the design stage – the layered borders and the soft drifts of colour – all needs time and space to arrive. It can take two or three years for your garden to mature.
The Chelsea illusion
Show gardens, like those at the Chelsea Flower Show, tell a different story. They’re built for a single moment in time. The designers will pack in mature plants at full size because the garden must look spectacular on one specific week in May, with the cameras rolling and the judges watching.
The effect is dazzling, but it’s all a trick. If those gardens were left in place rather than dismantled when the show closed, the plants would stay cramped and fighting for resources. Within a season or two they’d be overgrown and struggling, a long way from the picture of health they presented on the opening day.
Worth the wait
So, if you want the Chelsea look in your own garden, a little patience is the price of admission. Two or three years in, the gaps will close, the borders knit together, and the garden begins to feel properly established, the way it was always designed to.
The garden I visited last weekend is a perfect example. Two summers on, it has settled into itself beautifully, and it’ll only get better with each year that passes. You can see more about this project here.
If you’re thinking about a garden of your own and would like to talk it through, we’d be glad to hear about it.