I've been having yet another go at the bed at the entrance to the garden. It isn't a total success, that bed, and never has been in twenty-one years, either in terms of design or more pragmatically in terms of persuading the occupants to grow. By now I am not prepared to start again from scratch, and am merely aiming to fill in the gaps so as to have something reasonably harmless, that doesn't look too terrible but isn't too much work.
A fundamental design problem is that the bed is the wrong shape. It's almost an equilateral triangle, the result of fencing off the end of the wedge of garden lying between the entrance and the boundary hedge, and calling it a flower bed. The planting should have been carefully graduated for height at the outset, to take account of the fact that anything in the middle of the triangle and towards the hedge would be behind other things and would only be viewed from some distance away. It wasn't, and now I'm left with some awkward spaces to fill. I shouldn't have made it that shape in the first place, but it's done now, and the rest of the garden fits round it, so I'm not changing it.
An existential problem is that the bed, rather like a road verge, is generally viewed only in passing. Nobody is going to go and sit down by the boundary, just inside the entrance with a fine view of the lettuce farm and the dustbin. No window looks out directly on to it (or at least the spare room does, but people don't spend long looking out of spare room windows on the whole). It's not really a place, the entrance bed, but a space you go past to get to the house and other bits of the garden that are places.
A problem of cultivation is that the roots of the boundary hedge penetrate into it, making for tough growing conditions in what was already poor, sandy soil to begin with. And it gets the wind. Boy, does it catch the south-westerly blasts. Some of the larger shrubs in it act as useful wind breaks for other plants further inside the garden, but the entrance bed itself is a pretty exposed spot, at least towards the apex of the triangle pointing south.
In this ill thought out, inadequately considered spot, as a result of two decades of efforts to clothe the ground, I have ended up with some substantial shrubs that don't stand in any particular relationship to each other, in terms of either shape, flower colour, mood, or theme. A bird sown Portuguese laurel had made a large dome. I clip it sometimes, and am grateful for the shelter it provides on the downwind side. A variegated holly, Ilex aquifolium 'Argenta Marginata' is just about starting to form a decent specimen, in competition from the hedge. A pineapple broom is doing extraordinarily well, after a difficult start to life in a pot in the conservatory. It loathed the pot, and revealed its extreme natural desire to form a multi-stemmed shrub and not a standard, but at least I now know from first hand experience that they are highly wind resistant. It is a complete waste of wall space to give any of it to a pineapple broom. A variegated weigela plugs away valiantly. I would not say that its pink flowers and the yellow flowers of the broom did anything for each other. Two crab apples make slow growth, showing pathetic gratitude each time I feed or mulch them. A philadelphus battles on, and a Lonicera tatarica. A friend who grew the latter always said it was extremely drought resistant, and she was right. Mine keeps growing up into one of the crab apples, and has to be topiarised so that you can see over it into the rest of the bed. A Viburnum tinus right in the southern corner shows its distaste for the sand as odd branches periodically die, but the whole plant refuses to do so. There used to be an upright form of shrubby ivy, which formed a wider and wider mat next to the viburnum until I lost patience with it and chopped it out. It was altogether too much ivy. Two peonies do extraordinarily well along the edge of the drive. One I see from my notes is a form of P. officinalis, and the other I have managed not to write down on the spreadsheet, which is a bore. Some vast red hot pokers with very bright red and yellow flowers that mustn't be put next to anything pink likewise thrive despite being in partial shade, and make more seedlings than I really need.
Then there is a long litany, or would be if I went through it, of all the failed ideas and experiments, the things that died outright, or did so badly that I took them out, or linger on but may yet be ripped out in this latest attempt to do something about the bed by the entrance. By now I don't plan anything very elaborate, I just want to fill it with plants that look cheerful instead of half dead, that will cover the earth so that I don't have to weed it very often. There's a useful bit of space on the edge facing into the garden, where I plan to put chrysanthemums and salvias. I've got lots of the former, grown by chiselling little rooted bits off my existing plants and potting them up, and I'll leave spaces for the latter and buy some next year. That will satisfy my desire to grow chrysanthemums where I can see them properly, and my renewed appetite for salvias following the Plant Heritage lecture. The pokers should have finished flowering before the chrysanthemums start, but I think the salvias will overlap. That could be tricky, but purple might do it, as a colour able to work with both bright red and yellow and pink.
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