Alison Marsden, Gardening by Design
New Front Border
Site
The front garden of a traditional brick detached family house with Virginia Creeper providing a ‘cottagey’ look. The front door is the natural focal point. The main border runs the width front of the garden and is raised roughly 75cm above the pavement by a brick retaining wall. It faces south east and enjoys full sun for most of the day. The soil is well-drained and sandy which tends to acid. This will provide a good environment for acid-loving shrubs such as Azaleas but the soil has not been worked for several years and the nutrient content and water-holding capability need to be greatly improved.
The border is very overgrown; there are some mature shrubs but these are now over-sized for the space.
Requirements
A mix of shrubs, perennials and bulbs to provide year round structure and highlights of bright colour at all seasons
A degree of privacy without a full hedge across the front: enough permanent planting to prevent passers-by seeing directly into the house
Easy to maintain
Theme of yellow and gold foliage or flowers to reflect the bright yellow front door, without dominating the border
Front Border – Recommended
action plan
1. Remove plants that you definitely do not like or want even if these are mature specimens. A small garden does not have space for plants that you find ‘just about OK’. You must want each and every one.
2. Cut back shrubs that you want to keep but are too large for the space.
3. Cut back by about half the ground cover, creeping plants that you want to keep, i.e. so that they cover the area you want allowing for growth next spring.
4. Dig out the roots of perennial weeds.
5. Plants that you want to keep but move around will be dealt with when we get onto replanting later.
6. Spend some time walking around the border looking at how much space you have created and visualising what you want it to look like eventually.
7. Look at the view, towards the house and away from it, and decide where you want more permanent height to block a view.
8. Improve the nutrient content and water-holding capability of the soil by digging lots of organic matter.
9. Decide how many shrubs and plants you want to add to the border: you will needs about ½ of the final planting to remain through the winter to provide the required level of privacy.
10. Visit a couple of good nurseries and identify suitable plants that you would like to include, don’t buy anything but write a list with brief descriptions.
11. Return to the garden and consider the plants you have chosen for size, colour, what they might be planted next to etc.
12. Get your final list together and go shopping.
13. Dig holes, water and plant, including moving any existing plants.
14. Don’t forget to add plenty of spring flowering bulbs, such as daffodils, grape hyacinths and tulips, between the other plants.
Summary of discussion
on current plants
Shrubs
ý
Remove totally the Corkscrew Hazel, Corylus avellana ‘Contorta’ including the stump. It is too large for the space, it is not
wanted by the family and its removal will free-up approx 1.5 m2 for
other planting.
þ Cut back the outer stems of the grey conifer, a Chamaecyparis, to reduce the width by about 1/3.
The tree is healthy, the colour suits the new planting scheme and it provides a good frame for the house
Cut off the outer stems at ground level, always checking in advance that the stems that will be left exposed have good leaf cover. Do not remove more than half the bulk of the tree to avoid over-stressing it.
Constantly check the view of the tree from the front door to ensure that it is still symmetrical until it reaches the size required.
þ Hardy fuchsia, can be cut back in the autumn (to within 20 cm of the ground if desired) and it will reshoot and flower in late summer.
þ Rose of Sharon, Hypericum calycinum, is robust and can be invasive but it is easy to pull up unwanted stems. Bright yellow single flowers with fluffy centres cover the plant in early summer.
þ Variegated Euonymous fortunei will grow as a rounded standalone shrub or will climb up a support. It will stand hard pruning and stems reverting to plain green should be removed to retain the creamy gold colour.
?
Himalayan honeysuckle, Leycesteria
Hardy perennials – these die back to ground level in the winter and produce new shoots from the roots in spring.
þ Day Lilies, Hemerocallis provide a long season of large lily-like flowers from June to August
þ Valerian, Centranthus ruber, is robust with attractive greyish leaves and loose red flower heads
þ Hardy Geranium forms a low mound of attractively cut leaves that colour in autumn and flowers (white, pink or purple) throughout the summer. This specimen has clear pink flowers.
ý Sedge, Carex pendula. This is fairly decorative but each plant can reach a metre across and it will self-seed all over the garden and is better suited to a more natural planting scheme.
Soil preparation
After removing unwanted plants and cutting back as appropriate, you can start to improve the soil. This is not difficult but can be hard work as the current soil is very ‘hungry’ i.e. lacking in organic matter. Presence of organic matter is generally indicated by the colour: darker soils have a higher organic matter content and therefore higher available fertility. The local District Council runs a green waste recycling scheme and generates garden compost for sale as a soil conditioner.
The ideal day to work the soil is a dry day following some rain, however a thorough watering before starting will suffice. Usual soil preparation involves using a garden fork to dig over the plot to un-compact the soil and then digging in organic matter. Dig over the bed to a spade depth and mix the top 10cm of soil with a 10cm layer of the compost etc. Water the beds thoroughly before planting anything. If you can dig deeper and incorporate more organic matter that would benefit even more.
Dig carefully around shrubs and perennials that you are leaving in. There is no need to remove everything to condition the soil but sometimes it is easier and safer to lift an isolated plant and then replant it immediately afterwards. Incorporating compost around the remaining plants and mulching on top of the soil will benefit them too.
Planting approach
The house has a traditional and cottagey appearance and so a mixed border with an emphasis on informality will be a good complement. Also, a small front garden has to function 365 days a year and the house requires some privacy from the road, so a backbone of evergreen shrubs and tall grasses that stand through the winter is ideal.
Azaleas
Evergreen small leaved Azaleas are available in colours from orangey-red through to pinky-purple and can be clipped after flowering to keep to the desired size. Deciduous Azaleas have larger leaves that turn bright red or yellow in autumn. They come in many yellow and orange shades and many are very sweetly and strongly scented. These are more open shrubs than the evergreen ones and are typically 1m in height and spread.
Grasses
There is a wide of grasses, bamboos & sedge available now and the choice is largely personal. For example the 1.2m tall Miscanthus sinensis will stand through the winter with green or striped leaves and feathery flower spikes typical of a grass.
Coloured foliage
Shrubs with coloured foliage provide a permanent foil and very good background to plants whose main interest is a few weeks of flower colour. Purple-red is an ideal partner for yellow and orange flowers and several purple-leaved shrubs have very good red autumn colour. Yellow and gold variegation can also be used to great effect to reinforce the colour theme.
Sketch of a possible
replanting
This shows the border in isolation (wherein reality it would be backed by the view of the house) so that it is easier to see the colour and layout of the plants. This layout is a mix of the existing plants likely to be retained and new coloured foliage shrubs, azaleas and ornamental grasses.
The sketch shows the border as if all the plants were in
flower at the same time, but in reality the flowering period is spread
throughout the summer and several shrubs have autumn leaf colour too.. In addition
approximately half the plants loose leaves or die back to ground level in
winter, so the planting will then be less dense but sufficient cover will
remain to provide privacy from the road.
Eastern boundary
border
There is a long narrow border along the eastern boundary that runs along an access path for the length of the front garden from a gate adjoining the house down to a set of steps at the pavement. A visible boundary is required providing height (up to 2m) and some degree of year round privacy.
An alternative to the traditional hedge would be a more open structure such as a trellis-fence or a ‘post and swag’ planted with roses and underplanted with a low shrubby hedge of lavender.
The advantage of an artificial structure over a hedge is that the height is achieved immediately whereas most hedges are planted as whips and may take more than 5 years to reach the desired height.
Trellis
Many climbing plants, both evergreen and deciduous, will wind themselves through a trelliswork fence without further support. Alternatively some shrubs that are usually grown as freestanding plants will successfully clothe a wall, fence or trellis. A combination such as variegated ivy and a Firethorn, Pyracantha, with white flowers in early summer and orange berries in autumn will provide year round cover and colour.
Post & Swag
This is a construction useful where a solid boundary is not required. The ‘posts’ are wooden posts sunk into the ground at intervals of approx 3m and the ‘swag’ is a stout rope strung between, either a single rope across the top or with a second one a meter below. The rope is not stretched taut but loops between the posts in a ‘swag’. Roses are traditionally grown to clothe the structure with a permanent herbaceous or shrubby border planted along the bottom. Lavender is a typical cottage garden combination with roses; although roses are not evergreen, a network of the trained stems would be present in winter and the lavender offers an evergreen boundary of 40-50cm.