One of the joys of gardening in real time is the process of being part of the evolution. To have a vision in your mind, to set up a planting with all the best intentions about balance and compatibility and then to wait and watch it find its own feet. Like a conversation that comes of a well posed question and the trust that something interesting will come of it.
One such area is developing at the edge of the drive, where I planted the black-catkinned willow. The growing conditions here are driven by two things. The summer shade and shelter provided by the salix and the lack of soil, where the rubble of the drive provides us with hard standing. When we constructed the drive, putting in a low retaining wall to ease the steep slope, we backfilled a trench behind the wall with good topsoil. The hardstanding was made up with scalpings over the subsoil and a top-dressing of self-binding gravel. Together with a Scotch briar rose, the willow was given the topsoil to hold the garden back from view when you swing off the lane.
I then wove into the gravel a small number of plants that would take to the conditions and begin to colonise. Erigeron karvinskianus to run wherever it wanted out in the sun and native violets in the shadows. I added a couple of wafting Stipa pseudoichu to make the most of the breeze, because I knew it would seed and Anemone pavonina to emerge ahead of the Mexican daisy and herald the spring. Pooped by a bird on a willow branch, the pale flax (Linum bienne) arrived unexpectedly, seeded into the protection provided by the groundcovers. We are now starting to feel the natural mingling that makes a garden feel at home.
The Salix gracilistyla ‘Melanostachys’ is an adaptable shrub, flowering more earnestly for the exposure and making its own environment on this windy corner. I allow the leaf litter it throws down to build up under its skirts and have planted a half dozen Helleborus foetidus within its shadow. Having seen them growing wild in thin, chalky rubble on the South Downs, I made an educated guess that they would take to the growing conditions here. Sure enough, they have grown harder and more compact in the gravel and, with the addition of the leafmould provided by the willow, they have found their niche. Being naturally short-lived perennials, once spring takes over I cut the flowering stems back the ground and before they fully run to seed to prolong their longevity. New shoots are already pushing to replace last year’s growth with fine-fingered evergreen.
One plant a year has been allowed to seed to provide future generations and now we begin to see a colony form and the beauty of multiple generations. They have found their own place, which is always so pleasing to the eye and I will do little more than edit. Thinning the seedlings where they are too dense and choosing which plant will be allowed to throw its seed this year to encourage their movement so that the colony grows.
As the willow has grown and asserted its influence, I have added our native primrose in its pink forms into the halfway places they prefer on the edge of the shadow. The pink forms occur most often in old gardens, where they have likely crossed with cultivated polyanthus. When my mother left my childhood garden, where the primroses ran in the orchard, I moved a half dozen. Each slightly different and faded, like old textiles that have gone many times through the wash. Having seen our local primrose seed so freely into shadowy rubble on our back track, I imagined a colony of the pinks, each subtly different and linking so pleasingly to the mixed anemones that are just a stone’s throw away out in the sunshine. The original plants from my childhood garden have now proliferated, the sticky seeds carried by ants to places I hadn’t expected to see them and loving the low-level competition in the gravel.
It is hard to imagine now, after the endless deluges of this winter, but they wither into semi-dormancy in the heat and drought of summer and disappear amongst the cover of Mexican daisies to reappear with autumn rains as if nothing had happened. Rain, which this year has been without apparent end, is made lighter for their presence.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 2 March 2024
