May in the garden

Quote of the month:

‘There are only three options in life, Give up, Give in, or Give it all you’ve got!!’

The garden is looking amazing this month!! In the five years I have been at the salutation it has never looked better than this spring.

Since starting the restoration I have at times been too focused on the replanting, maintenance and shameless promotion of the salutation that I forget to enjoy it! All I see are the things to do and often the list is long and shameful. Now after years of replanting I am at last beginning to feel like many areas of planting are beginning to gel together and colours are tying groups of planting together and the garden is starting to resemble my vision of a garden filled with plants in every direction with long views of colours working together to create wonderful classic, romantic pictures.

That being said we also work very hard to make sure that for the keen eyed garden visitor has many plants to inspect close up with intricate patterned flowers and small groups of well placed plants working together to create smaller more intimate collaborations of colour. May is the month that we clear spring bedding, bulbs and plant material to make way for the summer displays in what I call ‘the shakedown’, this year however with such a cold winter and spring it will be a little later in the month or maybe even into the beginning of June, I like to stagger this ‘shakedown’ so we don’t lose all the colour at once and areas don’t look bare.

All this talk of classic, romantic combinations of colour can be a bit much for some people and even me at times so I ought to mention that I am a huge fan of some extremely vulgar plant colours!! One such plant is a rose in the tropical garden called Rosa ‘warm welcome’ it has glossy, healthy small mid green leaves with burnt yellow/orange flowers and when I first saw it in a nursery I thought ‘ahhh hideous!’, perfect!! You see even the prettiest of plants and colours if used stupidly are awful, but even the most Gordy hideous of colours when seen in an appropriate context can look amazing and a warm welcome is what you get from this rose in my exotic garden at the entrance to the main garden with its warm exotic colourations I can’t fail to stop to admire its efforts.

Steve