| ||||||
|
Begonia Bumper Pack 21 tubers - 7 of each - £11.99 Fuchsia Giants Collection A 5 young plants - £5 Geranium Colour Carnival F2 Hybrid Mixture 42 plug plants - £6.99 Impatiens (Busy Lizzie) Accent Mixed F1 120 miniplugs + 20 Free - £10.99 Lily 100 Days Collection 10 bulbs - 1 of each variety - £9.99 Petunia Orchid Picotee Mixed F1 100 miniplugs + 10 FREE - £12.49 Verbena F1 Quartz Mixed 84 plug plants - £13.99 |
Garden Styles- Garden Design
Gardens are frequently referred to as having a particular "style", Cottage, Tropical, Formal etc. But what does it mean? What follows is a brief description of the defining plants and principal features of a number of common garden styles. Most gardens are a bit of everything (or none of anything depending on how you look at it!), if you want to have a particular theme to your garden, it requires a certain amount of discipline. What does often work rather well is to have just have a part of garden follow a particular theme, instead of the whole garden. That way you can indulge your less disciplined side elsewhere.
You can help the garden help itself, by allowing annuals to self-seed and planting the tall plants fairly close to each other with a hidden network of support amongst them. In this way the supports soon become hidden and the tall plants help to support each other. The cottage garden needs to be packed with plants
for maximum effect, little is required in the way of hard landscaping, containers
etc.
Design Books
Becoming increasingly popular and was becoming more easy to achieve due to our drying climate, particularly in the South East. The last couple of years would seem to have stopped that aspect though. Many Mediterranean plants are sun lovers and are drought tolerant almost to the point of requiring it. They can usually stand the cold of winter, but don't like the wet and cold. Incorporate lots of sand and gravel into the soil with these plants to help them through the not-that-cold but very continuously damp English winter. Need an input of tender plants in the summer for authenticity. Otherwise fairly low maintenance especially due to those drought tolerant plants in the summer not needing watering regularly once established in the soil.
It is quite easy to get the "feel" of a wild garden however and they are often the most successful when they become increasingly wild with less of a cultivated look as you move away from the house (what do you mean that's what you've got already?). For a decorative rather than completely wild look, use a mix of cultivated and wild plants. In particular use cultivated varieties of native plants, Viburnum, Crab apples, Hawthorn etc. Low maintenance, but can look a bit tatty and unkempt if no maintenance.
You need to be very disciplined to maintain this look and plantings are restrained and of very few varieties of plant. Oriental gardens are almost entirely green. Low maintenance.
|
|
Probably
one of the most commonly referred to styles and certainly the most romantic.
To be authentic however a cottage garden is fairly labour intensive due to sowing
and clearing up after the annuals and tending to the herbaceous perennials after
they have flowered.
Not
the easiest effect to achieve, requires tender plants for best effect (with
associated maintenance). Mainly green with large leaves. 
Not
the most appropriate for a small area, or particularly successful at attracting
wildlife due to size, (but this depends on the location). 