Food for the soul

Our primary motivation and key priority on the smallholding is to produce as much of our own food as we can and we go some way in achieving this. However, instrumental tasks are not all; life needs to include an aesthetic dimension. One way of achieving this here is to give more focus on ornamental gardening which after all was my original route in to horticultural endeavours.

I've been thinking about creating a long border in the grass area at the back of our house for a while. I had in mind a mainly herbaceous border of perennials with few if any shrubs. A long flowering season, but reaching a peak in July and August and into September. I did not want to obscure the seasonal view of the fields beyond as viewed from the sitting room, so nothing much more than four or so feet in height. I envisaged a colour scheme made famous by that great gardener of the late 19th and early 20th century Gertrude Jekyll. She wrote a whole book on Colour in the Garden but broadly speaking advocated a border commencing with white and other 'cool' colours moving into various pastel shades and culminating in the middle of the border with 'hot' colours of orange and red and then back to pastel shades and cool colours. These were not strict rules to be followed  because occasionally breaking the rules increases the overall impact. It is also serves as a useful framework to thinking about plant selection and placement.

In the event I didn't quite achieve the colour scheme effect this year but will work on this more for next year. The border I created is 60 feet long and 6 feet deep and it would be quite expensive to plant up a space this large with perennials in one go. The solution was to grow virtually everything from seed. There were some perennials that I sowed which flowered in their first season. I also had a small number of perennials that I had been saving for the occasion, including two large hostas that had outgrown their pots. Nearly all the other plant were annuals which won't survive the winter. The annuals were sown in March and by mid summer were in full flower. The advantage of this was that I was able to achieve a full border in the first year, as well as being very cost effective. With the right choice of annuals you can achieve a similar effect to herbaceous perennials and avoid an institutional bedding plant effect. As time goes by I will add more perennials but annuals will always have a place. There are also one or two shrubs which can be treated like perennials. That is they can be cut right back in the winter and re-grow and flower in the summer. In this way they can be kept to a desired size and not outgrow their space. Hardy fuchsias work well with this approach. 

Overall, I was pleased with the result for the first year. In fact from cutting the first turf to reaching full flower took only about six months. I'll highlight some of the plants in another post, but for now here are some pictures.

The space in question in January 2021.
This was an area of rough grass just
beyond a patio and at a lower level.

February 2021. Turf removed and
the beds dug over. On the right is a
narrow bed along which supports 
were added for climbing plants. This 
had the additional function of forming
a divider to a small orchard to the right.

July 2021. Supports are in place for
climbers on the right. They are
alternating varieties of clematis and
climbing roses and will take longer to establish.

A closer view of the main border in July 2021