Garden design challenges: easy ways to deal with a wide and shallow garden
Plus: container planting ideas, and a fabulous Must-Have plant to attract pollinators
It’s August, and even after just a few days of warmth here in the southeast UK, the grass is beginning to look thirsty. But hold your nerve and don’t water it: however dry the grass gets, it WILL come back to green.
I am totally celebrating the August warmth
Back at the beginning of July, I posed the question ‘Where are the bees?’
The good news is that with the warm weather, they’ve come back, and in my garden they’re hanging out on one plant in particular:
In today’s edition, I’ll be showing you around this plant, as the first in the Must-Have Plants series, in which we’ll be discovering easy and brilliant plants for your garden.
I’ll also be tackling another common Garden Design Challenge. When we looked at ways to deal with a shady garden and how to create privacy from neighbours, lots of you then asked for a feature on how to deal with gardens that are wider than they are deep. You asked and I listened: today we’re going to be looking at how to plan a wide and shallow garden, one of the trickiest garden shapes to deal with. And there’s the opportunity for you to request your Garden Design Conundrum.
Are you faced with a garden like this? Read on We’ve also got the first of the Container Planting series, another of the new features I mentioned last week. This week’s is a super-easy, low-maintenance planted pot which doesn’t require any effort or skill beyond getting the plants in the first place.
Are you up for it?
If you’re a new subscriber to The Gardening Mind, welcome, and here’s a quick round-up of last month’s features:
We also had two fascinating ‘Digging Around’ Q&As with
and - you can find them here and here.Diary Date
I regularly host Zooms for paid subscribers where I explain how to find your way around The Gardening Mind, and how to use Substack in general. It’s also an excuse for a general chat about gardens, plants, design - anything you like! And remember, you can easily take part without having to chat or turning your camera on if you simply want to observe. Here’s the next one for your diaries:
‘General catch-up and any questions about how to find your way around The Gardening Mind ’ on Tuesday 27th August at 6pm UK time.
We have lots of get-togethers here on TGM: one of the busiest weekly get-togethers takes place online in the form of our regular Sunday Show Us Your Plots Chat - do please come and join in if you haven’t yet. It’s super-easy to take part and it’s a fabulous chance to share photos of your garden or a green space near you.
So how does Show Us Your Plots work?
On Sunday morning you’ll see a post on the Chat which starts ‘It’s Sunday 4th August and it’s time to Show Us Your Plots!’
And I promise you, your photo doesn’t need to be wonderful or edited - honestly, you should see some of mine. It’s just an honest record of what’s going on in our own gardens, or a green spot near wherever we happen to be. Will you come and give it a go this Sunday?
On the Chat we also now have a Midweek Mooch where we upload a quick video tour of a part of our garden, or something we’ve seen that we want to share with our Gardening Mind friends. More and more subscribers are taking part in this each week - come and have a go!
Wide and narrow gardens
Hands up if you have a garden that’s wider than it is deep. A garden which runs to the left and to the right of your plot, sometimes out of sight, and yet when you look straight ahead, the end of the garden is almost under your nose.
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about:
And here it is drawn in plan:
A wide and shallow garden is one of the hardest shapes to work with in garden design, and it’s a shape that I’m coming across more and more in small gardens belonging to new-build houses where the land has been carved out to ensure everyone has a green space.
But they’re everywhere - in town gardens, cottage gardens - if you’ve ever been put off or perplexed by a garden, the chances are that it was because it was wide and shallow.