Electric Green

Urban Dystopia At the weekend I returned to a garden that I made about eight years ago to show it some love. Funny, you turn your back for five minutes (or five years as the case may be) and everything goes berserk. The formerly modestly proportioned planting was level with the fence and swathed in a thick blanket of bindweed. Not simply bindweed growing through it, more a dense shroud over straining shrubs, the stems coiling up from the ground in fat ropes. Stringy corpses from summers past providing a ladder for this year’s growth. The mat of foliage covered a good third of the garden, swamping the shrubs and reaching up into the cherry tree. Working my way into the murky green understory to undermine the menace, I considered a dystopia; humans gone, neighbours no longer trimming the tree and battling the bindweed on the boundary. Where the fence collapsed and the spreading, new, layered plants of Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, Lonicera fragrantissima and Forsythia marched acros...

Verbena bonariensis and Cornus alba sibirica, with sedum in the background I have been taking a good look at my front garden, which, despite needing a bit of a tidy is coming on nicely. It is north facing on very sandy soil so not the easiest spot, and its autumn-to-winter look is basically red and green. The leaves have come off the Cornus sibirica leaving red stems, there are big heads of sedum flowers, a few dark red snapdragons left, Parthenocissus henryana climbing the wall (although the Hydrangea petiolaris seems to have died on me) and lots of lovely ornamental fruit on the little Malus sargentii . The green bit is provided by Choisia ternata , bamboo, a small rosemary, a Sarcococca and a few other odds and sods that flower at other times of the year.  Malus sargentii and sedum, neatly colour coordinated with my neighbours' car and front door  Trouble is, I think I am being too subtle. There are a few mauve highlights from the sage which is romping away (tol...

I am nervous. Our loft conversion starts today and there will imminently be a whole bunch of dynamic chaps jumping all over my front garden. When we first got here it was almost entirely paved and inelegantly adorned with a dead fir tree and two nasty Lonicera nitida . I promptly withdrew their planning consent, although one of the loniceras enjoyed a brief reprieve while I tried to clip it into the shape of an ogres head. Since then, I have added a Malus sargentii ‘Red Sentinel’, Cornus alba ‘Sibirica’, Choisya ternata , a Sarcococca (as recommended to me by the late John Cushnie, as it happens), Lonicera fragrantissima and a black bamboo – the general idea being that things that are not evergreen are red, scented, or at least interesting in winter. There are also lots of Narcissus ‘Jetfire’ which are just risking poking their noses out of the ground (just in time to get stomped by a hobnail boot, I shouldn’t wonder) and lavender and purple sage bordering the path. And I only get...