I completed my first professional gardening project a week ago. The site, a local front garden, is already hard-landscaped to a high standard, with a Cotswold stone chip parking area bordered with brick edged paving. My brief was to soften the harsher lines of the space and provide an elegant feature to either side of the front window of the house. The existing layout includes a long rectangular border from street to house, a blank canvas save for a shaggy 2.5 metre high Yew shrub near the front door.

Having carried out a thorough weed and leaf clearing exercise and applied and dug in topsoil and well rotted manure to the border, I lopped a couple of feet off the Yew and clipped it to as boxy a shape as possible. This instantly created a focal point at the house end of the border.

I’ve always admired the airy lightness of Nandina domestica, Sacred Bamboo, which isn’t a true bamboo and has none of that genus’s invasive tendencies. It is a member of the Berberis family. The smallish leaflets have a pronounced tip and possess the photogenic ability to suspend water droplets in a similar fashion to Alchemilla mollis, Lady’s Mantle.

There is an extensive stand of these evergreen shrubs in Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew’s Bamboo Garden, surrounding the Japanese silk weaver’s dwelling, the Minka House. These have reached a height of about 1.5 metres and demonstrate the shrub’s quality of creating a screen without the density of traditional hedging species.

Sprays of white flowers in summer followed by red berries are further appealing features. Four waist height specimens filled the border satisfactorily, with space between them in this season for white ‘winter bedding’ Cyclamen planted in groups of three. I continued the white and green theme with a scattering of Muscari armeniacum ‘Venus’ bulbs along the length of the border.

I sourced a recycled plastic range, ECOPOTS, ecopots.eu, for the three containers for the remainder of the planting scheme. These are high quality, beautifully finished and surprisingly weighty and their mid-grey shade is a good foil for evergreen foliage. Rather than opt for the predictable pyramids of Bay, Laurus nobilis, to fill the tall square-tapered containers to either side of the window, I chose a handsome alternative, Prunus lusitanica ‘Angustifolia’, Portuguese Laurel, which has striking burgundy stems. It will require shaping in coming seasons.

The final space to be filled on the site was a very shady corner behind a low wall facing the street, overhang with a neighbour’s Magnolia. I needed a solution which will in due course screen the dustbin and recycling boxes and which will tolerate the lowish light levels. I found it in the heft and strong structure of a Fatsia japonica with a speckled variegated leaf, the cultivar ‘Spider’s Web’. The white veins of the leaf patterning lighten a potentially gloomy corner. Here I used a large circular container in ECOPOTS’ Amsterdam range. 

I was fortunate in my first assignment in having a straightforward site, a few streets from home with clients prepared to host my first professional venture. May it be the first of many projects for Weeds Roots & Leaves.

 

 

Embedded in the heart of one of the quadrants of the ornamental vegetable garden at Osterley, I temporarily lose sight of the bucket into which I am putting the debris from this afternoon’s task. We are deadheading dahlias and pulling out Solanum nigrum, Black Nightshade. I have a vision of this large bed in December- its current plenty reduced to blackened stalks by frost, ready to be cleared away and the bed rotated. Standing in its centre, like the proverbial sore thumb, is a large plastic bucket full of rotting vegetation. My excuse for mislaying the bucket is that very plenty. Towering around me are Canna Lilies, some of whose vivid yellow and orange flowers have developed into seed-cases containing the black pea-sized seeds which give the plant its common name of Indian Shot. The red and yellow remnants of Mina lobata, Spanish Flag, cling to the large wigwam constructed from hazel poles. I remember a crisp day last winter in the park when we gardening volunteers graded into separate piles the hazel trunks and stems coppiced by the ranger team. Spanish Flag can be grown from seed and is a colourful annual climber for a sunny position.

 

From my position in the centre of this sea of plants I can see a tall Nicotiana, with creamy greenish bells clustered in a spire above large green leaves, the scale of which are a reminder of its cousin, Walter Raleigh’s tobacco plant. Clear pink Zinnia heads clash (in a good way) with the bright orange flowers of the Mexican Sunflower, Tithonia rotundifolia, whose flowers resemble the form of the Zinnias. There are fewer flowers than a month ago when they were a magnet for bumble bees.

The feathery claret flowers of Amaranthus wave throughout the bed, busily seeding themselves and eliciting enquiries from curious garden visitors. The ‘pseudo-grain’ produced from Amaranth resembles Quinoa, source of both protein and pronunciation debates.

Relieved to rediscover the elusive bucket, I continue to pull up the shallow rooted Black Nightshade which is doing its best to choke the surrounding plants by sending up stems closely packed together which entwine their victim. It is identified by small white flowers and glossy black fruits, and seems to grow at an alarming rate. Despite its sinister name, I have read that the berries are barely toxic and in some parts of India are regarded as a delicacy (William Edmonds’ ‘Weeds Weeding (& Darwin)’). On the subject of sinister plants, Ricinus communis, with its dark Burgundy hand-shaped leaves, provides a brooding contrast to the cheerful hues of the other plants in this bed. The seeds of the Castor Oil Plant are the source of the deadly poison Ricin.

Within touching distance are the large yellow dahlia blooms I am meant to be deadheading- carefully avoiding the tight buttoned buds and snipping off only the stems supporting the pointed (and confusingly bud-like) spent flowers, their inner petals still visible.

This morning we had the pleasurable job of planting tubers and bulbs for next spring. Into the front of ‘Dickie’s Border’, named for a long-time Osterley gardener, we planted the bizarrely shaped dark brown tubers of Anemone coronaria (of which more later). The central sections of Mrs Child’s Flower Garden were the locations for clusters of tulip bulbs, in my case ‘Couleur Cardinal’, which is a traditionally shaped Triumph tulip whose purple flowers open to bright scarlet as the flower matures.

Before finishing for the day, gardener Ed takes us to the cutting garden to see a row of the species of Anemone we had planted earlier in the day, which has confusingly started to flower this autumn. The label reads ‘St Brigid mixed’. The cerise, white and purple flowers are double with an almost shredded appearance around a dark purple stamens and ovary structure. I leave Osterley intrigued to have discovered a group of Anemone cultivars developed in Ireland and named after a saint The Penguin Dictionary of Saints describes as revered in Ireland ‘only less than St Patrick himself’! I haven’t been able to identify why this name was chosen. The saint’s feast day, 1 February, is too early to coincide with even a prematurely flowering specimen. Whatever the reason, St Brigid’s namesakes are undoubtedly pretty and I shall be looking out for those we planted when they flower next spring.