My friend Lucy came to give me some advice about my tired interiors. She has inherited her mother’s good interiors genes and finessed them at the National Trust. When she visited, she took on an entirely professional, practical air. She drew back the net curtain, looked out on to my front garden and said something so blindingly obvious, I still can’t quite understand how I missed it. “You don’t need net curtains if you have a leafy, tall front garden,” she pointed out. “Plus, your front garden is a mess – you should redo it.” To hell with the interior: I have a garden to design.
My front garden is north-east-facing with good morning light. The soil is heavy clay, though thanks to the compost I’ve added over the years there is a good top layer. There’s a fine apple tree I planted four years ago. The roof water drains straight into the garden, to slow down the amount of run-off into the wider system, so one side of the garden sometimes gets very wet, while the side nearest the front door remains rather dry.
As it sits for the best part of the day in shade, the garden relies on texture and leaf shape. Thus I have splashed out and ordered a pretty Japanese viburnum from Crûg Farm Plants that will add some height behind the apple tree. Viburnums are hard-working plants, offering attractive foliage, flowers and berries in autumn. They typically grow to between 1.2m and 1.8m high, and are easy to prune if they get out of shape. The leaves are arranged in opposite pairs, are often prominently veined, and in most deciduous species, they colour wonderfully in autumn. The flowers are mostly white or pink, and in some cases highly scented. Japanese snowball bush (V. plicatum f. tomentosum ‘Mariesii’) has white clusters of flowers in spring and prominently veined, dark green ovate leaves that turn purple in autumn. The foliage is borne on tiered branches, which means you get wonderful light through it.
Around that, I am adding oak-leaved hydrangeas (Hydrangea quercifolia) with their handsome leaves and large, pointed panicles of white flowers, again with good autumn foliage; they can grow up to 1.5m in height and spread. To sop up some of the excess wet on the drain side, I’m going for ferns: ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), with its elegant, lime-green fronds in spring, grows to 75cm with enough moisture, and the evergreen Japanese lace fern (Polystichum polyblepharum), which grows to 30cm.
Holding all of this together will be the evergreen Japanese grass Hakonechloa macra, which forms gently cascading hummocks and does best in dappled shade in moisture-rich soils. In June and July, it produces fine sprays of lime-green flowers that billow in the wind. It lends itself to path edges and turns a lovely russet in autumn. And because every garden needs some frothiness – and I have far too many in the back garden – I will dot some sweet cicely (Myrrhis odorata) here and there, for its cow parsley-like flowers in spring.
