The Hot Garden
There was never a plan to work on this part of the garden during the 2023 growing season. We agreed that by keeping a laser-like focus on the Arrival Court and adjacent Entry Garden, we could avoid the half-assed crawling toward an undefined sense of semi-completion that is the the hallmark of my work (past examples include doors without handles, live wires protruding from outlets, and Mondrian-like paint swatches on walls that I try to fob off as “a look”). But when Philip, the excellent arborist-cum-landscaper who installed several large trees at the front of the property called last September to say he had a day free, I jumped at the chance to have the area now called the Croquet Lawn graded and seeded.
What follows has been a If You Give A Mouse A Cookie series of events that has me breaking my back over the creation of a new space. Because although the grass seed never really took root last autumn, what did germinate was a concept for the entire portion of the garden beyond the Boxwood hedges. In March I began the great “European Beech Hedge Gambit” that promoted me to the status of “professional nurseryman”.
In April, we purchased seven apple trees that currently exist in a liminal state between discrete semi-dwarf specimens and a unified espalier border. Overseeding of the Croquet Lawn has resulted in a cracking deer grazing habitat. The remaining eyesore is the space just outside the Beech Walk, on the way to the Woodland Walk, that we have christened the “Hot Garden”.
A garden that features colors in the yellow-orange-red spectrum has come about as much by default as by design. The Entry Garden is planted with inoffensive pastels designed to calm the visitor and take advantage of the many cottage-style plants that are suited to this morning sun/afternoon shade environment. The Hot Garden enjoys a full afternoon of perishing heat, and is well-suited to a range of plants that attract hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies as pollinators—an advantage for every part of the garden.
Here’s the problem: when it comes to color theory I’m at a complete loss. All of my gardening heroes—Christopher Lloyd, Rosemary Verey, Chris Beardshaw, Sarah Price—seem to create intricate palettes with the greatest of ease. I appear to be stuck in the “look at the color wheel, select two adjacent colors and one directly across, and call it a day” school of design. My decent-sized library of classic gardening books provides some help (and don’t say Gertrude Jekyll, I find her indecipherable), yet there is often a wide gulf between plants available in the UK and those for sale in the US. The best guide I could could find is Penelope Hobhouse’s Color in Your Garden. Keen-eyed readers will notice, by a nuance in the title, that this is a book written for an American audience. And although she adheres to a “why use ten words when a thousand will do the trick” style of writing, I did glean the one idea that will inform this garden: the sunset pattern. This just means starting with white/yellow and moving through orange to orange/red to red to red/purple (there: I just did in one sentence what took PH an entire chapter to explain.). This works very well for me as the far end of the garden will lead into the Woodland Walk.
Some of the plants will come from the greenhouse. Yellow flowering Heleniums will nestle next to Verbascum and sit alongside the umbels of Achillea. A few white Peonies and Lupines will lurk along the very edge.
Continuing along the garden you find taller Cut-Leaf Rudbeckia, a mixture of sunflowers, and the Orange/Lime Queeny Zinnias.
Next comes the Giant False Heleanthus in orange/black in and amongst Scarlet Geum, Red/Lime Zinnias, Crocosmia “Lucifer” and Ruby Red Phlox.
The row finishes with very tall Rose Mallow connecting (I think) to either Cotinus or Sambuca as a final punctuation mark as you walk into the woods. Most are natives and all should be a great draw for pollinators.
This year’s Chelsea Flower Show revealed something that should be obvious, but came as a surprise and made me feel better about the state of my somewhat bantam-sized greenhouse plants. Those chunky big specimens coming out of the grower’s hothouses, bulked up and robust, are second-year plants, not this year’s seedlings. So as my Achilleas struggle to be seen, I hold out some hope that come July this will be more of a Hot Garden and less of a Dirt Garden.
For a long time echinaceas seemed only to come in a kind of mauvey pink but, in the last few years, I've been able to pink up some wonderful corals and vivid oranges. I wonder if these would make good transition hues amongst your reds and purples? They are an excellent July and August flower, in addition to being indigenous. I think they'd be very friendly to your red hot pokers.
It's all sounding so good. It's always a learning process, innit? One of the great pleasures I've come to in my now mature garden, is the amending and enriching of the soil. I love how the plants respond, and how a richly manured (sheep, my preference) mulching makes the garden look so cared for. I didn't pay enough attention to the soil in my younger gardening days, just wanting to get things growing and blooming. As the Mennonites up here say: "We grow too soon old and too late smart".
Oh how I'd love to stroll through your gardens and into the woods! Sounds lovely. Your description of the sunset pattern made me think of chakra colors (with green and blue missing, though you'd get the green with foliage). I'm enjoying your processes.