Favourite Plants and Gardens

My Thoughts of the 2021 Gardening Calendar

I say every year I will put a plan together and visit a certain number of gardens, while trying to plan my own garden to make it somewhere I can feel relaxed, energised and inspired. It’s a bigger job than I had anticipated and the bumpy nature of the last two years has seen the unexpected take over. Visiting anywhere can never be taken for granted again. That I managed to tick off a couple of the gardens on my wish list, plus a few I came across, has meant that inspiration has been available.

Colour is very important to me. I love taking artistic photos of flowers, bushes, trees and landscapes, but in my own garden I am trying to avoid ‘delicate’ pinks or ‘sunflower’ yellow, but I love dark aubergine reds and purples, and rich oranges and rusty brown.

Purple tulips I planted this year.

These perennials I love but some are difficult to grow in my garden. I am learning what appreciates the aspect, temperature and orientation. All other faults that cause the plants not to thrive are my own! Knowing what needs constant watering or overwintering inside can be a problem that causes me to lose things.

Not often featured in the pictures! I haven’t mastered the selfie!

Buildings

Gardens tend to wrap around buildings and as someone who studied architecture and worked on architectural and gardening publications, I can appreciate the design of garden features to emphasise the experience of all manner of gardens, how the features of landscape can heighten your enjoyment and anticipation of outdoor spaces.

Accessible Borders

I want to combine plants in my garden in unusual ways. Some things work, and others I have to rethink. It’s not going to happen instantly unless I get surprised by a telly gardener who has heard of my dreams of a an eternally evolving space which allows my MS episodes to be the reason why it is accessible whatever my current physical abilities allow. In truth Lockdown pounds are more of an issue currently!






If I could afford all the things I see growing, then my garden would be spectacular. I need to understand the layering of different plants and seasons, and how that works in my garden but after this year when the seasons changed on a random basis, I struggled to keep up with the things I want to get rid of which keep reappearing and keeping an eye on the things I have tried to introduce.