Bloomin’ lovely

During the building of our new guest wing, it was a pretty much impossible to develop the garden.  Any gardener that has ‘had the builders in’ knows that they have big boots and are not averse to running over plants every now and again.  As the build drew to a close towards the end of 2016, we started the ‘white garden’ in front of the Barn.  It probably seems a bit pretentious (we have just stolen the idea from Sissinghurst in Kent to be honest) but we figured that it would look great against the black decking.

Having just criticised our builders (!) they were great at landscaping the ground, shifting soil around to even out the lumps and bumps.  However by the end it was a bit of a quagmire with bricks and nettles not far below the surface.  Just to complicate things further there is a network of pipes carrying waste out to mains sewerage (not a lovely thought but can’t be avoided!) so plants should be shallowly rooted to avoid causing any potential problems.  Oh and three manhole covers….  

The result is a roughly triangular patch with a gravel path dividing the garden into two beds – one of which is partly north facing and the rest baked in the sun.  So all in all a bit of a challenging patch of ground.

Eighteen months later we thinking it’s looking ok.  The bareroot yew plants lining the path, planted in the middle of winter (not a fun task) have, by and large survived.  The beds have been planted with lots of delphinium, peonies, roses, lavender, wallflowers, salvia, nicotiana, alliums, ferns, hostas, hellebores,  astrantia, valerian …… all white of course.