Scabiousa 'Beaujolais Bonnets'
I've been thinking about garden design a lot lately. One of the secrets to a cohesive design is to repeat plants or elements. I have trouble with repetition. I just don't seem to be able to restrain myself to use the same plant all over the garden, when there are so many fantastic plants out there that I could be growing.
Then there is the current advice to plant in large sweeps of a single plant. Here at Squirrelhaven, we call that the lawn. The only sweeping I do is with a broom. The thing is, the large sweep looks terrific during its season of interest, but what happens when it's out of bloom? Usually, it's a big blob of yawn. (Plus there's that monoculture concern.) I can see how a large sweep of some sort of ornamental grass could work if it were interplanted with spring-flowering bulbs. But even then, grass, grass & grass just doesn't attract the pollinators like blooms, blooms & more blooms. Mixing it up means I always have something interesting going on, even if it's not a wide sweep of it. Gertrude Jekyll may have advocated large drifts of a single plant, but she also had borders that were just for spring interest, and others that were for fall interest. I don't have that much land, and all of it is fairly visible from the house. It's got to look interesting all the time .
Here is the Hellebore bed from March through October.
above left, just after clearing the old foliage, above right, April
These two above are reversed in order. On the left is June, on the right is May.
from left: midsummer, September, October
Would I be happier if I had a more limited palette of plants? And which ones should I cut out? There's only one Actaea simplex 'James Compton' in there, but I'd hate to be without it because of its wonderful scent.
But instead of only one, there should be at least three of them. I tried that in another part of the garden, but only one bloomed, and then dwindled, while the other two have never bloomed. This is the place where I have got a thriving plant that has bloomed for several years now. But clearly, there isn't room for three of them there, unless I remove something else. I feel like Mozart, being told there are too many notes.
I garden in reality, a plot of earth that has too many thirsty tree roots, on a slope that drains too quickly. In the shade, these are very challenging conditions. The intensity and quality of the light varies greatly within just a small area. I can't just draw a design that looks great on paper, it has to function in my garden, with plants that don't always behave as expected. Designers would probably advise me to stop fighting the conditions and simply mass pots, or put in hardscaping. Never! (Where would I store all these containers over the winter, or am I to be limited to plants hardy in Zone 3*?) I think I've found a solution I can live with, which I will describe in a later post.
*To survive, perennials in containers that will remain outside all winter, must be hardy to at least two Zones colder than the Zone of the garden.