Salvia leucantha. The first Salvia I chose for the revamp of those borders either side of the central steps. There could be no other choice. I had loved this plant since I had first seen it at college, way back when I was working for the council and had no chance of ever growing such things for a living. A plant of great elegance, arching habit, two-tone flowers, whitish stems, good foliage. How could that ever be wrong? Tender, of course, and requiring work to produce new specimens for each following year, but worth the effort. We couldn't have grown this when I first started the job. First we had to construct the protective structures. More later.
Then there were other beauties. The brick-red Salvia confertiflora, for example, a colour that might be difficult to use in an ensemble, but it went in there anyway, based on the rule of greens, greens being most of what you see, with the flowers being little more than specks of paint flicked from a distance.
And then, almost making no statement at all, the gorgeous silver-leaved, black-flowered Salvia discolor, a subdued beauty you had to hunt for at the front of the border, as it was quite small.
And then all manner of others in various shades of pink and electric blue, like the following:
None of these was anywhere approaching the description of pastel, but I had learnt a thing or two by then. This was ten years on from my arrival at the job. I had taken on board my own feelings and the comments of visitors, so many of whom in the early days had protested that there was insufficient colour in the garden. Not that it was up to me to radically alter the concept of the original design. I was working for a conservation organisation. That would have run counter to the brief. However I also had to consider the economics and aesthetics of what I was preserving. I needed to make it earn its keep, and to do that I had to make it beautiful, enough to attract sufficient interest to bring in the income needed to maintain and develop the place. Some might call that achieving compromise. I thought of it as taking it where it logically needed to go. Ironing out its inadequacies and making it better than it had ever been. A garden that is static is one that falls behind, becomes a prisoner of its own history. A garden needs to move forward to retain its currency, even within a historic context.
The other thing I had begun to realise by this time was that I was tending to reject new hybrids from my choices. When I looked at the naturally-occurring species like those above, I found I was satisfied. I would only buy a nurseryman's hybrid, an unnatural modification, if it surpassed the species by a significant margin. Sadly, so many new developments add little to the effect of a plant in a large border. There may be major improvements to be seen close-up, but on the grand scale they disappear in the overall sensory stimulation the border gives. Obviously, I am not stupid, and I wouldn't automatically reject something that showed improved disease-resistance, hardiness or a new colour-break for example. I applied very subjective criteria to my choices, and I couldn't describe what would favour one choice over another. But generally, I would be drawn to the more spectacular of the species over the man-made. Like many other professional gardeners, I was starting to love nature again, albeit nature from all over the world, not my own backyard.
I often hear people say, 'there is no colour clash in nature, anything goes', and they are not wrong in asserting that. Where they are wrong is when they apply it too simplistically to gardens. Unfashionable though it was for a while, I used to love the random bedding that we sometimes used in the council schemes. We had a riot of colour in a low wall about 50 metres long, the top of which was planted out each summer in a chaos of brightness, consisting of all different varieties of bedding plants randomly interspersed with one another. It looked cheerful, and followed the rule that nature has no clashes. Where that argument falls down is with block or drift planting, which is common amongst 20th century gardens, where the artifice of the garden diverges from the heterogeneity of the natural landscape. When you formalise it, design it, placing monocultural groups side by side, you alter the parameters. Then it becomes like a painting, a textile, a wallpaper pattern. It becomes artificial, and suddenly some colour contrasts start to look wrong. Even some of the ones I tried out myself. Watch this space.
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