Day 60 - Foreplay

By the second year of our recently-restored chalk-pit, the plants were beginning to bulk out a bit, and the general effect was quite pleasing. Two original features were the rampant roses at the entrance, the one on the right being the known thug 'Kiftsgate' and the other being a similarly exuberant form with more bluish foliage. We had various forms of these extremely vigorous roses throughout the garden, in fact several different varieties which from a distance were interchangeable in terms of their long-range effect. It may have Rosa longicuspis, R. mulliganii or R. filipes. In June the entrance to our dell was a picture with both of these buzzing with bees and massed with white flowers.

From the path that skirted round the top of the banks the view looked like this. It was already looking quite full and a distinct improvement on the empty weed-infested flinty soil we had had at the beginning of the project -

Note the smooth curves of the shape, which were infinitely more relaxing than the pointless fripperies I had taken over. Earlier in the season it had looked more sparsely planted, yet nevertheless tidy, and healthy with its heavy mulch of mushroom compost -

This was it, then, the foreseeable future, and it was not bad, but it didn't give me a kick in my erogenous zones. I began to crave more. At some point I invested in long-term speciality plants, a grafted specimen of a cut-leaved Walnut, for example, which was a wonder to behold, with its beautiful delicate foliage leaning out over the contrasting underplantings.

One test of any garden is to see if its bare bones work in the winter. Does it impress under different conditions without flowers or leaves? Certainly the horizontal branching of the big roses makes an interesting contrast with the other shapes in the borders, but of course, when so much of the plant content is herbaceous there is little to show in the dormant season. I suppose the advantage here was that this was so much an outlying entity that it didn't really matter so much if it was less successful in the winter. In any case we shut at the end of September, so no one was going to see it except us.

Unless you have very strong shapes and forms, snow scenes can often be disappointing, and to me this just looks like a bunch of plants covered in snow. It doesn't do it for me. I decided to go for a different effect. I would not be creating strong bones that would make a statement out of season. I would be going all-out for foliage and colour during the peak time when we were open. In the winter the paths were mostly too wet for us to want to access this part of the garden anyway. It was best to leave it to its own devices now that we had it established and growing. Nowadays, when the garden is open nearly every day of the year, different considerations apply. I would be having a rethink, and placing more structural evergreens, I suspect.

Even five years later I hadn't done much to change things as for the most part it was growing well. There didn't seem much point in investing time into alterations to something which for most people's taste was working well enough. Not when we had so many other big changes to make.

In the meantime, though, I had absorbed some outside influences and was starting to yearn for more excitement. I had been to more Head Gardener functions. I had been talking to people who had fun in their gardens, with sunflowers, with rare and tender specimens, with colour. It was no longer enough to have nice. I wanted spectacular. My horticultural erogenous zones had been stimulated. I was in danger of exceeding my briefs.