Planting – Individually yours

For most of us things are much closer to home. One plant that I use quite a few of is Ruta graveolens. Whenever I smell that plant I’m always reminded of travelling through Kendal one summer with several Rutas in the back of a VW Polo, clouding the car with their very strong scent. I grant you that it is a long way from the Mediterranean and it’s Rosemary, but Kendal it is.

Plants can conjure up many images and memories and in doing so can set the scene and feel of a garden or indeed any planting area.

The most obvious planting schemes we see each day are the council shrubberies on the roadsides and roundabouts. Dogwoods, Berberis and laurel amongst others all make a dense and basic planting, they do their job and do it well. We can all spot a commercial planting scheme half-a-mile away and associate that planting with other places too such as supermarket carparks. The other planting schemes are the council summer bedding displays in parks, town centres and other communal areas, lots of bright geraniums and bergonias to brighten our days.

When it comes to our own gardens things get a little bit messy, a little bit spontaneous. Thankfully we tend to buy the plants that we like rather than setting out with a definitive shopping list of exact plants. It’s incredibly rare that I ever see a specific planting scheme in a garden such as 100% Mediterranean (with Rosemary), but more often than not any specific thought-through scheme will have  been inspired by visiting a garden abroad or in the UK, or a garden that’s been featured in a magazine or perhaps the internet. Even then the scheme will only be based on an idea and other plants and features will creep in – it’s called individuality and gardeners are generally very good at creating something unique to themselves.

Planting schemes may have an association with plants bought when on holiday,  inherited from other gardens or given as presents. Numerous times I’ve been told by people that they’ve bought a specific plant because they saw a similar one on holiday and found one in a local nursery when they came home. And into the border it gets planted, maybe a bit of a jumbled scheme but it works and why not?

However some modern planting schemes lack that uniqueness, that potential distinctiveness and can almost be described as bland with too much box hedging and an expanse of sameness everywhere. Avoid the blandness and take a planting scheme, tweak it, add to it, put in the things you like and have meaning and make it individually yours, it’ll be a more rewarding planting scheme even if it doesn’t have Rosemary from the Mediterranean or Ruta from Kendal. (The above article is an extract written for printed publication March 2015)