I know bedding is considered a bit passé, too Victorian. It doesn't have a whole lot of credibility in modern gardens. We find it overformal and it doesn't seem to speak to our times. At least that's what garden snobs would have us believe. But most of us aren't in that category. Public parks that can still afford it revel in their bedding schemes, and we, the spectators, love the exuberance of the colour they provide. I wonder if money is the reason for its unfashionability, rather than its implied bad taste. When you can't afford something, it is easy to ridicule it as an excuse for no longer indulging. Personally, I like bedding, when it is well done, that is. What constitutes well-done is a debatable point, of course. I hope that by showing some failures as well as some successes we will be able to end that argument here.
So first I want to have a look at what counted for a summer scheme in the long-gone early days. First lesson - those long-gone days were in fact very recent, because the same plantings had been used for most of the years the garden had been in existence, and had remained unchanged until the year before I arrived there.
In our hexagonal beds I was informed that there was traditionally a planting of Heliotropes, which are nice plants, but quite dark, and rather dull on their own. And the hexagonal beds had shrunk down from five to one small one in the centre, so the display was unspectacular. No photographs remain of this. However, by the later stages, in the late 1980's, the amount of labour and greenhouse space needed to supply Heliotropes had led to a change in the scheme, and in fact ivy-leaved Pelargoniums were being used, bought in and typically in smaller quantities than would do the area justice. See below:
I opted to return to the original idea of Heliotropes, but succeeded in lightening the effect by a simple interplanting of Helichrysum petiolare. It was effective, but limited by the loss of the four larger beds. I would do something about that in years to come. The common name for Heliotrope is 'Cherry Pie', because of its perfume. Nowadays nobody eats cherry pie, so nobody got the answer right on the children's quiz that posed the question. What does it smell of? Flowers.
The rectangular beds on the south side always had a seasonal monoculture of Dahlia 'Park Princess'. By this time Dahlias, with one or two notable exceptions which we shall come to later, were rather out of fashion. In any case, 'Park Princess' was to my eyes a particularly undeserving specimen, combining a none-too-pleasant foliage base with pale pink cactus-type flowers which died ugly. By which I mean that spent flowers turned pale brown and lingered, requiring daily dead-heading to keep them looking half-way fresh. The next photograph shows them fairly early in the season, before they had reached their full height, and relatively unspoiled by the remnants of dead flowers. They nevertheless do not make much of a statement, contributing a perfectly bland tone to the general lassitude of the garden at the time.
Of course, some people like that sort of effect, and habit dictated that that was the only look that was considered suitable in this pastel garden. That was the unidirectional view of the Cyclops of history. Of course it wasn't the only option, but then some of the alternatives were dangerously inappropriate too.
Along came the new owners and a new Gardens Adviser who was rightfully saddened by the way this area looked. Not only were there these four drab beds, but they were backed by the raised plantings we saw earlier in the blog, which we gradually replaced first with a subtle silver, purple and pink arrangement, and then finally with exuberant Salvia borders. These beds in the early years were so infested with weeds that they had been kept fallow for two or three years to allow for clearance work. Now that a new Head Gardener had been appointed they had been replanted and were just waiting for the summer to be joined by a harmonious bedding scheme. Dahlia 'Park Princess' would probably have done the job quite nicely against the first subtle scheme in those raised beds. The Gardens Adviser had other ideas. I got instructions to 'knock them between the eyes' with a brand new theme of the now popular cult Dahlia 'Bishop of Llandaff' with an edging of Euryops chrysanthemoides, on the grounds that long-deprived visitors would clamour for a sensory experience that would rid them of all their past doldrums. Bad idea. We received complaints. It wasn't in the spirit of the garden, it was a new broom gone mad. Of course, I got the blame for it, being the idiot who stuck the plants in the ground, but it hadn't been my idea. I had never even heard of Euryops chrysanthemoides at the time, but suffice it to say that putting a purple-foliaged Dahlia with scarlet flowers bordered by a bright green-leaved strong-growing prolific golden daisy was a big enough statement in its own right. Never mind how that would work against a backdrop of silver, pink and purple. Let's have a look, shall we?
Oh God. Hang my head in shame. Not everybody likes the strong contrast of red and yellow at the best of times, but with that backdrop - really? In fact, seen in isolation without the pastel border behind, it probably achieved what the Gardens Adviser had been hoping for, but it wasn't popular.
Looked at like this, I could live with it, but I couldn't spend all my time looking away from its surroundings -
Seen from above enclosed against the quiet greens of the landscape, it provided a pleasing dash of brightness amongst the subdued tones, but I think in the end, everybody agreed that it was an experiment too far.
The problem I now had was that not only had I kept all the 'Park Princess' in the nursery for old time's sake, but I now had a substantial number of 'Bishop of Llandaff' that shouldn't go to waste either. What was I going to do? And a couple of hundred Euryops which wouldn't even tone in with any of our other borders? There was a conundrum which gives me a headache even today, for which reason I won't be discussing it till tomorrow.
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