Cottage gardens: can you really grow edibles and ornamentals together?
Plus: a vital but often forgotten layer of your planting design. And the first dahlia combinations are here - it's a good one
If you’re landing here for the first time, welcome - it’s great that you’ve found us, at EXACTLY the right time of the gardening year. There’s lots going on here - garden design ideas, easy gardening how-tos, plant recommendations, general garden chat, border planting design tips and tricks and lots more. If you’d like to join in, I’d love it:
Well I certainly got a bit of a surprise this morning. For the first time in forever, I hadn’t checked the weather forecast, and when I opened the curtains this morning, there was SNOW.
Ok so not exactly alpine, but still enough to blur the lines and make the light amazing, so I had to get out in it immediately: thank you to everyone who joined me on the dog walk, and if you missed it, you can see it here.
If you're new to The Gardening Mind, you might like to join in the Chat - Sunday is Show Us Your Plots day, and there’s a lot more going on for members through the week, so do come and have a look - it’s a very friendly space, as you’ll see from the comments below.
The video demonstrates a concept that’s easy to forget when it comes to border planting design: garden borders are successful because of what’s behind them. In the members’ area today, I’ll be taking you through this, with those key three plants.
As well as that simple planting combination, I’ll also be looking at this similar palette of plants whose shades and tones are delicate and yet totally strong at the same time, making a bit of garden magic:
The first dahlia combination is here and I want to hear whether you might be trying it out.
In the Cottage Garden series this week, I want to take that whole idea of edibles and ornamentals (I refuse to call them edimentals - I just don’t love that portmanteau word) and see how we can work them into our own cottage garden spaces. After all, the cottage garden is meant to happily have a bit of everything….
New members, you might want to join in with the Cottage Garden design series - whatever size garden you have, if you like the gardens I make, I think you’ll find something useful here. Members also get the worksheets so that you can sketch out ideas for your own garden and refer back to them in the future.
If that sounds useful, I’d love you to join us.
Here’s what we’ve looked at so far - there’s absolutely no rush and you can do this at any time:
When designing borders (have a look here at the Border planting design course we run each year) it’s easy to become so absorbed with what’s happening at ground level that we forget one of our potentially really good assets: the walls/fences themselves. The vertical canvas they provide gives us such a massive opportunity to create a sense of depth by really thinking about the backdrop.
These three plants at Sissinghurst are an excellent example of how using this vertical ‘rear’ transforms a planting border, making everything in front of it work. You might not be familiar with the first of these three climbers - it’s an unusual beauty, wisteria-like in its danglingness, creating a soft framework for the other two plants, and a showstopper in itself:
SO:
Why does this work?