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| Natural wildflower type planting, great, but what are those pesky dusky blue flowers?! |
There was a time in my amateur gardening career when I had narrow
horizons and my growing interest extended to fuchsias, and no further. I
went in for them in a big, big way. But fuchsias, like any plant have
their limitations. Lets face it, they may vary in colour and frilliness
to a certain extent, and they are lovely, but they are all much a much-ness.
Luckily, at some point somebody must have smacked me over the head with
another plant and opened my eyes to a world of possibility. Now I realise
that variety is key; it doesn't bore the other users of the garden so, doesn't
require epic overwintering measures and I must admit is a little more
stimulating on the eye.
I sometimes consider myself to have an ok knowledge of plants; I
know my Agapanthus from my Alliums for instance. In reality there are
thousands of plants that I don't even know exist and its not until one extracts
oneself from ones own veg patch and goes and visits somebody else's garden that
one is made aware of this. Due to a severe shortage of time on my part I
don't get out as much as I should, in a gardening sense, but Hampton gave me an
opportunity in the form of the show gardens and the nursery's wares for sale.
I saw a lot to wet the palette, but not much of it came from the show
gardens Im afraid. Now Im not sure I actually saw many of the show
gardens, but it was boiling, I was sweating, the feet were hurting and I had
the attention span of a gnat before wandering off to find a combination of
shade and water so it needed to be good.
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| Do flowers only come in purple?! |
I only made it into the 'inspire' section late in the afternoon,
saw one wildflower meadow, saw another, then may have wandered off back to the
flower marquee. Don't get me wrong, I will take a wildflower meadow over
a bed of Begonias any day, I appreciate a bit of natural planting and I am
wholly supportive of planting for insects, but I think if a wildflower meadow
is going to be used in a show garden situation it needs to include some really
special things. One of the gardens had a ring of tall grass encompassing
the garden forming a surprisingly solid boundary but still allowed the viewer
to look in which I thought was a nice idea, no use in the winter obviously but
could be used as internal partitions within your garden during the summer, and excellent
if you have the odd rabbit bouncing around.
Another thing that bothered me were the colour schemes. I
get that purple and white flowers are nice and people like them, I like them,
but god are they boring. I looked into one garden and it was a sea of
purple and white, there were alliums and lavender and thats all great, but
personally I would like to see some really interesting colours and
combinations, but then I like colour. In another garden there was a
really great dusky blue flower, no idea what It was unfortunately, but it stuck
out for me as the highlight within another wildflower meadow with a great big
rusty metal cow stuck in the middle of it; how delightful. All I want to
see really are a sea of labels so now I would actually know what that flower
was.
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| The first section of the Britain in Bloom exhibit: Agapanthus? Check! Purple and white colour scheme? Check! Decorative archway? Check! |
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| I don't think these can be described as being anything other than whoppers! |
The show garden that really stood out for me was the Britain in
Bloom exhibit. I didn't see any blurb explaining what the garden was
about, and I certainly didn't have the energy level to search for it, but
whatever the point, I liked it. Not the first part; blue and white
alliums, trellis; standard. The second bit was an extremely visually curated
vegetable patch. None of the vegetables resembled the tatty plants I have
in my patch and they were absolutely huge and therefore well past the point
where you would want to eat them, but what does that matter when it looks
good?! But the third bit I thought was excellent. In the words of
Coldplay 'it was all yellow'. Consisting of a bank of yellow stretching
from my feet at the front right up into the sky at the back in the form of
sunflowers grown en-mass like they are in foreign fields. Apart from the
odd touches of complimentary burnt orange and purple and obviously green, every
plant was shock it to you yellow, and I thought it was brilliant. You may
not want an entire garden of yellow at home, but then who wants a giant rusty
cow either? It was bright, uplifting, fun; like somebody had taken Big
Bird from Sesame street as the inspiration and created a border from there. Yes
it wasn't relaxing, but not everybody goes into their garden for a nap.
It worked though; I didn't buy any wildflowers afterwards but I did buy a
packet of sunflower seeds, and that surely is the sign that a garden was
inspiring.
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| Yellow border from the Britain in Bloom exhibit, particularly like the bands of a single plant at each height |
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| That Dahlia basically is the flower embodiment of Big Bird all by itself |
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