How to design a small garden - the big reveal as we reach the end of this series
Plus: the best tulips this year, and the monthly round-up in case you’ve missed anything
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Well, as we near the end of April, what a month it’s been
The cold weather has freeze-framed the tulips in flower: as they first appeared at the beginning of March, that means we’ve had a solid two months of tulip blooms, which I’d say is excellent value.
I’ve seen a lot of reports about a poor tulip season: I’d recommend that, this coming autumn, you do what I did last year which is to plant your bulbs in sterilised pots with fresh compost, and give the borders a break.
I’ve had the best tulip season in a long time - I do think this particular collection is fabulous and lasts forever in the garden as well as in the vase - later on in this post I’m sharing their names, along with a video tour so that you can see each one close up: do jot these in your garden notebook for your early autumn shopping. One of these tulips has features which mark it out as something very special: it’s the one everyone is asking the name of, and I’d love to know if you’ve grown it.
This tulip is a definite must-have, especially as this was one of the tulips I left in the borders last year - it has come back again reliably and healthily twelve months later. A reliable, strange, mysterious beauty.
Also in this week’s edition:
We wrap up the small garden design series: I’ll be re-running it next year, but in the meantime, if you need to catch up, you can find all the sections here.
A reminder about the weekly Sunday Show Us Your Plots thread on the Chat - this weekly photo-posting continues to spread far and wide as more and more people from more and more places all over the world are starting to join in. Let’s try and spread the word - you can do this by either re stacking (reposting) this newsletter by hitting the ‘restack’ button - the two arrows making a circle:
or by sharing it, by pressing the Share button. Or both!
Our June Real-Life Meet-Up is taking place at the wonderful walled gardens at Water Lane in Kent. Details are at the end of this post. Lots of you have signed up for this - if you haven’t yet, scroll back through to the Chat thread which I posted on 12th April, and you’ll be able to drop a note there.
Next week, we’ll have the monthly to-do and not-to-do list - and guess what, my chitted potatoes will still be on that list!
In the next few days, designers will be breaking ground at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. If you’d like an inside view to the highs and lows, the ups and downs, here’s a taster of some of the Flower Show and Show Garden posts here on The Gardening Mind:
If you’re interested in creating a show garden, or simply interested in the process, next week I’ll also be sharing the process of designing one of these gardens, with a case study taking us from a blank piece of paper, through ideas, to the finished product.
Before we get to that, though, here’s our Garden Digestif round-up of everything that happened here on The Gardening Mind in April. If you’re new to TGM, you’ll see you get a lot to browse through at your leisure each month:
The monthly Garden Digestif
Thank you everyone who joined in with the small garden Zoom meet-up this week: we had a good look at how to use the Grid system of design and how it can help your garden design. The recording is available to paid subscribers, and you can find it on the chat.
We’re starting a book club! More about that here:
The brilliant
took us on a tour of her gardening journey:Don’t forget to plan now for that July moment when your garden will look surprisingly bare after the June flush. I give a shopping list here:
You got to ask me all your pressing gardening questions:
In another design post, we had a think about what kind of style you like in your garden - do you want it to be traditional, formal, informal:
I went to the launch of a new book, and the author Sean Pritchard shared some wonderful garden secrets, as well as inspiring me to actually cut some flowers for once!
And lastly, but definitely not leastly, I visted the most extraordinary of secret gardens, and checked out the best wisteria for you to grow:
And now for some small garden design, along with the best tulips, in this bumper end-of-the-month edition:
Small Garden Design: the big reveal
My priority here was a family garden full of fun, a welcoming space with places to hide, places to read, places to play, places to have fun, places simply to be.
You may remember this photo below - it’s the ‘before’ shot of our case-study garden. And what a mess it was. Just take a look at the chaos.
Fox-phobic neighbours had erected a huge ply fence, and there was nothing of merit in terms of a view. A family of creatives with children ranging from baby to teenager, this garden needed to work really hard in terms of what it could offer in terms of play, dining, relaxing, planting, storage, and most importantly of all, fun. And this is how I did it: