A new year and two new terraces, cold frames bursting with unusual and interesting plants ready to go; utter joy for a confirmed plant geek like me.  But geekery does not a garden make... and herein lies one of the biggest problems keen gardeners face.

Growing as many different plants as possible - and let’s face it there are literally thousands to choose from - poses a huge challenge in terms of design. The ‘one of everything’ approach gives a garden a haphazard, unsettled appearance, spotty like a Monet viewed at too close range.

The answer lies, in my opinion, in giving the garden what Penelope Hobhouse (everyone do the cross sign over your heart, for she is the patron saint of gardeners) calls ‘good bones’. A structure from which to hang all the loose diaphonous planting, billowing perennials and interesting little Phlomis that would otherwise just sink into the general woolliness. “Good bones” can involve hard landscaping and sometimes even earth contouring, but tends to mean hedges and topiary.

Newly planted Phillyrea wedges

For the two terraces I’ve chosen two different plants and taken ideas from two very different gardens. The lowest, the so-called ‘Mediterranean Terrace’ has “wedges” - differing triangular sections of Phillyrea latifolia that slice into the garden almost as if they were the fins of a school of sharks swimming underneath. Their glossy leaves are a particularly handsome shade of dark green which will contrast well with the many grey and silver-leafed plants. 

The inspiration for this came from a garden I looked at a few years ago for BBC Gardeners’ World; Weir House in Hampshire, England. Here the designer Jill Billington gave a beautiful 18th century house a modern yet sensitive garden. She doesn’t seem to have designed that many gardens, but that one really struck a chord with me, elegant yew wedges giving a contemporary twist to an idyllic English idyll of green lawn, apple trees and clear lazy stream running along the boundary. It’s open a couple of days a year for the National Gardens Scheme.  

The second, higher plot is the so-called ‘Southern Hemisphere Terrace’ (waiting for a more elegant name to present itself). Here lots of the plants will be darkish evergreen shrubs so the whole contrasting colours thing won’t work as well. Instead I’ve decided to work more on the shapes - using hedges as a unifying element, adding planes of light to otherwise again fluffy mass of foliage. Inspiration here came from a much better-known garden, Hummelo in the Netherlands, home another garden guru, Piet Oudolf. Good old Piet, he’s already spurred us to plant a Prairie Garden on the other side of the property, and now here he is among the Grevilleas and Leucodendrons.

Hummelo, October 2010

A big part of Hummelo’s genius is the fact that Piet’s wonderful, airy planting has a great backdrop in the large and undulating series of yew hedges at its periphery. 

These catch the light, adding wonderful shapes and solidity, amplifying infinitely the impact of the plants in front. 

In my own small way I have imitated this in a series of low, wavy hedges made from the dwarf myrtle - Myrtus communis subsp. tarentina.  They’re still small and sparse, but already they give a good idea of what’s to come. I can't wait to see them thicken up in the springtime. 

In the meanwhile here's a picture of the Grevillea 'Winpara Gem' bursting into flower just as the year gets to its coldest month. God Bless the Aussies! 

Grevillea 'Winpara Gem'

Exciting changes are afoot in the garden. Almost exactly a year after the huge holm oak was toppled by snow, C has linked the ‘Arena’ (as we call the garden created in its wake) to the rest of the garden by a curvaceous sleeper staircase along the foot of the cliff. Funny how hard landscaping projects like this can totally change the feeling a garden... Suddenly a part that was just background blur becomes included in the field of vision, and one’s latent urge to design and plant comes into sharp focus... watch this space...

In the meanwhile I’ve been busy planting other, more readily accessible areas. Two terraces above the old potager which were just flat, empty; strimmed yearly to keep the Smilax and other horrors at bay. Except they weren't all horrors. Wild Cistus and Rhamnus alaternus clung to the edges. In early summer last year I’d planted that trusty South African, Nerine bowdenii along the baked edges of the terrace walls. With autumn rains these bloomed beautifully and reminded us that within these dull empty rectangles there was... potential.

The water bill arrived - incidentally during a huge cloudburst - and it was well, eye-watering, forgive the pun. An intensive day inside drinking tea, watching rain and ruminating gave forth the idea to create two new gardens, unirrigated, on the terraces. The bottom is a Mediterranean Garden using only the most drought-tolerant plants, which must look good in summer (not the natural state of affairs for the native flora round here which peaks in April/May and steadily goes into hibernation until the September rains). Quite an ask.

Nerine bowdenii on the terrace wall

The nature of the soil and site - plus the gaudy pink Saffa Nerine bowdenii blooming on and on till almost Christmas gave us the idea for the next terrace. It’s quite simply the warmest, driest, best-drained part of the garden, and a century or more of leaf litter cascading from the steep woods above has given the sandy soil a deep cap of leafmould.

Gardeners, in common with almost everyone else, always want what they can't have. One of the families in particular which seems to drive us all to distraction, so utterly different from northern hemisphere plants, is the southern hemisphere's precocious Protea family (Proteaceae).

I remember working on a shoot with BBC Gardeners' World at the stunning Tresco Abbey Gardens on the Isles of Scilly, stuffed full of the most weird and wonderful Proteaceae, from tree-like Banksias  with flowers like huge fluffy candles made of yellow fur to Protea susannae with its own equally mad-looking, UFOesque flowers. "Better than sex!" was how one elderly visitor summed them up. I was hooked.


Beauty comes at a price. They're a demanding bunch -  perfect drainage, as little frost as possible and acidic soil are the broad requirements. A challenge for a garden 1200ft up, mostly on clay and backed by limestone cliffs.

Still smarting a year on from the loss that fateful snowy night of our only member of this family, a Grevillea ‘Robyn Gordon’ which had been doing surprisingly well down on the sticky clay at the Guest House, I resolved to grow these treasures again, and to grow them well. This was to be their place. To be continued!