Drawing a Blank

I remember the joy of my first taste of ‘planting design’ so clearly.  In the depths of motherhood in lockdown I enrolled in an online course as a way of making some small and achievable progress towards a future I was impatient for.  I was set a series of simple beds to design, each with various constraints, and received (extremely helpful) feedback on my work.  On one hand there was a childish playfulness to arranging plants, and on the other the absorbing puzzle of visualising them season by season, around and about, over under and through each other.  Finally, a brain teaser I enjoyed.  In fact, it became something of an escape through the highs and lows of motherhood.  Creating fictitious spaces and escaping to them whilst rocking crying children.  I would set out a puzzle for myself, a corner of an imagined garden, and begin to furnish it season by season.  As I was in labour with my daughter, I clearly remember dreaming up the sea of blue that I would plant around the feet of a stachyurus (a favourite of mine and in bloom when she was born).

Tasteful but a little too subdued for me

So, it’s a strange feeling to be sat, pencil in hand, struggling to put down on paper and link together the many scraps of ideas I’ve had in the last year for planting up my own garden.  When other people have asked me to design beds for them, they’ve usually come armed with an array of pictures of what they like and often with a request for easy and minimal maintenance.  Helping people navigate that process still gives me the enjoyment of those first exercises in design.  But somehow creating my own garden feels impossibly hard.  It’s my own space and I can grow whatever the hell I like, especially as I have no real desire to create a polished or perfect space.  But I love so many things and could combine them in so many ways that trying to pin my thoughts down feels impossible.  Since my goal in my own garden is to have a space to experiment and learn, try things different ways and get to know for sure how I would do things for other people, there isn’t the usual requirement for simplicity.  I have one bed here which I planted up with the elegant classics which seem to be so much used and asked for these days: Nepeta to line the path, Salvia ‘Caradonna’, Rosa ‘Desdemona’, Iris sibirica and Gaura and so on.  It looked lovely but is so far from my own style that I immediately want to change it all again.

I try to remind myself that, since that first taste of planting design, I have come to realise that gardens are never perfect, finished or static things, and that that would defeat the joy of them anyway.  A garden is a constant, complicated process.  A drawn plan is a good kicking off point, but no more than that.  Even the best planned garden would have to shift and change every few years as plants expand, compete or succumb.  No doubt mine will be unrecognisable in a few years’ time as I realise my mistakes and try to rectify them.  Very few planting decisions are a one-way ticket (I’m holding back on the wonderful but woeful ‘forever perennials’ like Acanthus or Anemone x hybrida until things settle a little having spent far too much time digging them out of other people’s gardens).  In fact, in the new area I’m planning, the vast majority of shrubby plants are fairly short-lived cistus and the like.  Within the decade I will be replacing them from cuttings and the whole space will shift again.

Collecting plants in temporary beds last year in order to begin propagating them

Then there is the knowledge at the back of my mind that even if I drew up a ‘finished’ plan, I would never be able to plant it immediately.  The area I’m working on is 4 beds of 5m by 7m with a long bed beside.  A huge space to fill.  I’ve been busily trying to create plants to fill it out: a sea of cuttings and seedlings in my greenhouse.  Inevitably I’ve ended up with modest numbers of those I prize most and buckets of those I’m ambivalent about.  But even with these I know there will be a period where I’m coxing and boxing to cover the ground.  I plan to buy the main backbone of shrubs, and I tend to dice up and grow on my perennials when I first buy them, but realistically spaces will be held by those things I have more readily available (100 Lychnis coronaria seedlings from my parents’ garden to become 1,000 self seeders next year) whilst I try to build up stock of the things I want (Rhaponticum centaureoides, Serrulata tinctoria, Tulbaghia and so on).  A satisfying process, saving some money and connecting me with every plant in the garden but it means that the garden will be a shifting, very imperfect thing from the start.

For me, the joy of gardening is in the process and the detail.  The practicalities of planting and tending, and the small corners of interesting combinations which shift season by season.  In the age of Instagram, it’s very easy to think of a garden as a picture, an end goal, and to feel the pressure to get something ‘right’ immediately.  I keep seeing gardens planted with ever closer packed plants as we all try to attain the immediately full and finished ‘look’ we see on-line.  There is a constant pull to see a garden as a finished product when in reality it is a process and an evolving relationship.  I think this is particularly true in our own domestic back gardens.  As in life, if we focus entirely on achieving some fixed ideal and forget to enjoy the journey, we will have missed the real magic of a garden.

Euphorbia myrsinites snaking over the first newly laid stones

As I put pencil to paper at last, I try to shrug off the sense that someone is watching and judging me over my shoulder or that my ideas need to be inspired and spot on first time.  Building imaginary gardens is substantially easier than creating real ones, though much less meaningful.  If I forget practicalities for a few minutes, I can recapture that sweetshop feeling I loved when my gardens were imagined, and start to pin down wisps of ideas: carpets of pale cyclamen revealed in winter beside silvery foliage; big cardoons shining against a backdrop of Cotinus, Euphorbia myrsinites snaking its way up and over stones.  Fundamentally I am creating a horticultural playground for myself and planting out the starting point of what I know will be a long and fulfilling journey.