Gardens should be designed to look as interesting throughout the entire four seasons in a year. Lets not forget about winter…

Through choosing ornamental grasses, trees, shrubs and plants that possess beautiful and winter tough seed heads and stems, this is completely achievable.

This is my garden, and on the whole I really like how it looked and worked as a space in 2019. There is always room for improvement though .

  • Winter rain
  • Winter rain and wind.

These are my recent thoughts on how I would like to improve my garden for 2020 .

I occasionally bring home long deciduous stems from customers gardens after pruning them in winter. I loved the curve of this Cotinus coggygria ( Smoke bush ) which I recently pollarded in a garden. The stems are now inserted in a container at home, however I think its time I bought my own shrub !

  • Pruned Cotinus…
  • Its a shame to waste the stems

These shrub roses belong to my friends, Judy and Martin. I would quite like to incorporate similar plants in my own garden. They are pruned lightly in winter, to achieve this effect, and stand over two metres in height.

Shrubs are presently making quite a come back in planting design, and I think this could easily extend into Roses.

My garden is mainly containerised, with self seeding annuals and grasses filling the gaps. For the last eleven years I have literally shifted the containers around as the spatial arrangement has never quite worked. Last year though, I finally achieved design satisfaction. There is now one large seating area set among the containers and three raised beds.

After a full week of being a gardener, there really is nothing better than just sitting around the garden table watching the flowers, and garden wildlife.

  • The view from the garden table
  • The view through the grasses from the garden table

Every year brings new opportunities to experiment with new hardy annuals and ornamental grasses in my garden. Catalogues and websites have been perused, and a wish-list created. There is no way I could grow all of these – or is there ? Please note I have 2 full pages of A4 to whittle down…

There really are some fabulous seed companies out there. I do know I will be growing ornamental grasses from the Chiltern seed range. Sunflowers from Thompson and Morgan. Tomatoes and Chilli peppers from the Sarah Raven range. And then there is the fabulous Higgledy seed and Suttons.

At home, I am delighted to see hardy annuals, perennials and biennials including Umbellifers, Poppies, Geraniums and Teasels self seeding freely into the cracks between the bricks to create a nectar rich understory layer which softens the hard edges of all the containers.

  • Geranium and Ammi majus seedlings.
  • Poppy,Anemanthele lessoniana and Ammi majus seedlings
  • Teasel.
  • Amenanthele can get into the tiniest of spaces !

I am finally getting my vision together for what will hopefully be a floriferous, stem and seed head filled gardening year.