Acers, all the acers

When we moved in I thought "ferns and hostas, ferns and hostas" and it didn't cross my mind, really, that ferns and hostas need specific conditions; I just bought hostas from the garden centre which said "partial shade". Being so affected by the woodland conditions and the north-east facing aspect to the garden, what I really want to create is something to look at all year round. I can't grow lots of exciting flowers so I decided on foliage, architectural planting and contrasting shapes and textures.

Of course, what you get with ferns and hostas is GREEN - lots and lots of GREEN. And, when the snails attack, frayed and shredded leaves in amongst the green. Which means you have on-purpose and purely accidental sharp edges which, frankly, look dreadful (hence the hostas are now in pots).

So, my current job is to introduce some different colours and textures into this part of the garden to make it look more interesting throughout the year. I am also trying to work on levels and heights so that there is a sense of depth to the bed and not just low lying foliage.

Acer palmatum Katsura





This little beauty is perfect for a shady corner and, in my garden, the orange and yellow serrated leaves will add interest against the sandstone. The tree grows only to around 90cm x 90cm which is perfect in a bed about 5m long, especially as it is situated next to the window so it should give some framing effects as well. It will turn orange and red in the autumn and its leaves will also give some colour in June when everything else is just GREEN.




Acer palmatum Atropurpureum

I have had this acer for ages and have kept it in a pot; last year it became really quite infested with weeds and moss and looked like it was dying (this is a theme in my garden!). So I gamely chopped it back and stuck it in another pot and it, rather politely, came back to life again this year. It has been in full sun for a few years now and seems reasonably happy but I am thinking of transferring it to the garden. At the moment, it is still in the pot so that I can move it around to try to find the best spot for it. I co-planted it with crocuses this year which looked rather nice whilst it was still just twiggy but probably not quite the right aesthetic!



Acer palmatum orangeola

So I might be a bit in love with this one. It is in a really quite shady spot but in very good soil and I am hoping it will be happy in its little corner. So, this acer will grow to around 1.5m (hopefully!) and has a weeping habit. I am imagining the long graceful branches giving some much needed softness to the rather angular construction of the garden. The foliage will turn a bright orange in the autumn and winter - I am very excited about it :-)
It is a dissectum, which means that the leaves are splayed and look like snowflakes.

I have planted next to it a Japanese painted lady fern in silvers and purples, and also an anemone Honorine Jobert. My plan for the rest of the bed involved heucheras, trilliums, brunnera 'Jack Frost' and probably some tiarellas, a winter-flowering jasmine and...I go on!

The (very shady, damp, clay) flowerbed beneath the window

Above is the plan for this bed which gets about two, maybe three hours of direct sunlight a day but is otherwise plunged into darkness.

It is complicated by clay soil which gets waterlogged and then dries out hard. So far, I have solved this by digging loads of grit into the soil and by using plants which are generally reasonably happy in this environment.

Primroses love my garden and so multiply in a biblical fashion - unfortunately they look really tatty once their flowering is over - the below photo was taken this morning which shows most of the planting in. It was beautiful in the spring with the blues and purples of the pulmonaria and the lovely primroses and primulas but, as the image shows, it means A LOT of green at this time of year.

In the back of this bed I have recently planted an Acer Palmatum Katsura which I got for £14 from B&Q. The plan is to take the Hosta Blue Mammoth out and put it in a pot - the slugs and snails are far too organised in this part of the country! I have already transplanted two of the three hostas which I put in last autumn (the first picture shows Hosta Twilight) so that there is room for other plants as the plan above shows. The hydrangea by the door is Hydrangea Petiolaris which has been in for two years and is climbing but not flowering this year. The top picture shows some very happy ferns including Dryopteris erythrosora which is a Japanese shield fern: the new leaves are a beautiful coppery colour. Other than than I am awaiting the flowering of some lamium and an astilbe.

My focus for this bed is really to give some all year foliage which looks interesting whilst the other, sunnier, parts of the garden can show off with spring and summer colour. I am hoping to crack it with the plan I have and I will put more photos up as this bed develops. I adore hellebores and there are three in this bed - I actually can't remember which ones though one is definitely a Harvington Picotee. I usually head to my local garden centre "seasonal reduction" section first, and I got six hellebores in varying conditions for under £20 which would usually have cost a small fortune. They are such a joy in the early spring.

Rip it out and start again

In the beginning...

In 2015, we bought an old sandstone house. The house was built in the 1830s and had been part of the housing provided for the administrators for a local mine. Our house was the paymaster or accountant's house and the first in the row of five. I have some ideas about the history of the house but much of the original features have gone. We do still have original sash windows in most rooms but the shutters have been taken out in all but one room; we have a couple of fireplaces and an original (and rotten) front door. The house had been empty for some time and the garden was a bit of a wilderness. There was clearly, at one point, a nice looking garden there but it was sad and overgrown when we moved in.

Some of the planting had some lovely old world connections with a holly bush by the front door, traditionally thought to deter evil spirits, clary sage, lemon verbena and thyme in amongst the yellow poppies and immature sycamore saplings from the two giant specimens in this little space. 

The seating was rotten, as was the fencing, and there were overgrown trees (why you would plant 8 trees in a 30ft square garden is beyond me!). 

Up to this point we had been renters, so my gardening experience was limited to growing things in pots and being very pleased with myself when they didn't die. 

So here I was - a very inexperienced gardener, overgrown woodland garden. Panic (and a little bit of hopelessness) set in. I was told by all and sundry to "leave it a year"...being a fixer by nature that was very tough, my fingers were itching to get in there. 

Of course, I dug things out and then went to the garden centre and wasted lots of money on plants that just vanished - eaten by slugs and snails, pooed on by badgers, foxes, thousands of pigeons and the seven local cats used to being able to do what they liked. There were tears and more frustrations. 

This view shows the old path which was being pushed up by the roots of the sycamores and was, frankly, quite dangerous. 

The photos above are a year apart - a good friend of mine who is a great gardener and seems to know everything - accompanied me on a sad walk around the garden where I whined about dry shade, wet shade, clay soil, roots, trees, awful bits of fences. 

"Many people would kill for a garden like this", she said. 

Hopefully, they wouldn't (!) but she then went on to tell me in no uncertain terms that I had to do the British thing and sort it out myself if I didn't like it. 

So - thus began the ripping out and starting again. 

The photo above was taken in February of this year - where my journey of trial and error (mostly error) began.