At last I had the time, inclination and confidence to step outside the stultifying traditions of the garden, and go for broke. I was helped by having recently replaced my entire team, so I had a new contingent who had not been influenced by direct knowledge of the past, or by indirect mutterings about any attempts at iconoclastic behaviour on my part. I felt liberated, and convinced that we could now make the place look better than ever before. We could do what all gardens need. We could advance into a new phase, respecting the past, but without slavishly repeating it. We could make it what it deserved to be, rather than preserving what it had slumped into. Arrogant maybe, but completely justified. (Do I need to add a smiley face here?).
After the usual winter storage - ah, perhaps I should explain the magic of that? We had a very simple system. Remember, I like to try to make everything as easy as I can so we have more time left for the finer points. Whereas some gardens laboriously lift their Dahlias and pot up stock plants in January under heat to take cuttings from, or others store their tubers in sand or some other medium, we just used to bung them upside-down in racks made of chicken wire in an old shed with frost-protection provided by tubular heaters. We would leave them there from lifting in early November till the beginning of May, when we would turn them the right way up into boxes of peat-free compost and place them outside to start producing new shoots. We discovered the best boxes for this were the ones Tescos use to deliver your shopping to the door. They are deep enough to hold well-developed tubers, and stack on top of each other. Using these meant that we were able to revise our winter storage system, and would keep them for nearly six months in the same boxes we would then fill with compost to start their growth in. These we would stack five or six deep, so they didn't take up much space in the shed, separating them and lining them out in the open when starting them off at the beginning of May. Highly recommended.
So the Dahlia 'Fascination' theme moved in the next year to the more prominent area in the central south side beds, where they did a good enough job.
But as usual, I wanted more. Whilst all these changes were taking place, I had been thinking about how to further enhance the plantings, and to this end I had been training the wonderful Eupatorium atrorubens as standards to rise above the Dahlias with their spectacular foliage. To contrast their upright habit, I also trained some Buddleja alternifolia to grow as weeping standards to hang their silver foliage and lilac flowers above the beds. These would be permanent plants, which we would not need to lift every year, so they would hang over our spring schemes as well as the summer ones. The Buddlejas weren't ready the first year, and in fact all the standards were relatively immature when planted. I didn't stay in the job long enough to see them really grow to full stature, as I was nearing the end of my time there.
Our photographer captured some fine moody shots with the young Eupatoriums, though, in early morning light -
I was very pleased with the effect, and only needed to see the scheme complete with the standard Buddlejas, which I was able to do in my final summer. Newly planted it looked like this -
A little later it had developed into this -
Sadly, I left that month, before seeing the Dahlias in flower beneath the spectacular dot-plants. One thing I know for sure - we had created something that was unique, stylish, and a huge improvement on the entire past history of bedding in this garden. My opinion only, of course, and you are entitled to differ, as long as you are prepared to accept being wrong.
The hexagon beds were now crying out for something comparable to compete with this, and as I said before, they tended towards the shady end of the available light spectrum, so I chose a bright scheme to fill them. The purple-foliaged yellow Dahlia 'Yellowhammer' was edged with a permanent planting of the deciduous, sculptural grass Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola', again saving work in years to come by not requiring replanting every year. The young foliage would work well with various shades of tulip in the spring, as well as setting off the summer plants so superbly. I'm only going to show you one photograph of this, because it speaks for itself -
The soft cascading form of the grass, the compact purple foliage of the Dahlia, the clear yellow flowers topped by Helichrysum 'Limelight' in the urn, the gradual rise of the tiers to the apex - come on, if you don't love that you have a dead heart.
As can be seen above, the Dahlia flowers became a richer orange in dry conditions.
For me those two bedding schemes were masterpieces of simple seasonal planting, and I don't care if the whole world disagrees. It won't be the first time everybody has been wrong. Let's face it, recent politics has shown that most of the people can be wrong most of the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that.....
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