minutes.
Unless you are especially stubborn, there is little point buying plants that have only a slim chance of surviving in your particular plot.
Some sites can be changed fairly easily. For instance, if your soil is poor, it can be enriched with large dollops of food. If the drainage is bad, digging in piles of grit can help enormously. If your garden is on an exposed coast, planting salt-resistant trees to act as a windbreak will hugely increase the possible choice of plants. But, basically, learning as much as you can about every aspect of your garden is a good starting point. Few gardens have just one characteristic. There are nearly always shady corners. There is usually a spot that remains boggy after heavy rain. And it is rare to find a garden without a sun-baked section somewhere.
The soil type should also be ascertained. Most plants in this book will grow in either acid, neutral or alkaline conditions. Some have preferences towards one end of the scale, but are not too fussed. Occasionally, one will be listed as being a lime-hating plant, which means that alkaline soil is not an option. Sometimes, if gardeners are really determined, large planting holes can be dug out and the existing soil replaced with something more suitable to allow their chosen plant to succeed. But this is really only a temporary solution. Eventually, the plant roots will grow down into the natural soil and start to suffer accordingly. This is not, therefore, something I would recommend.
Irrigation is another point to consider. If the chosen plants need frequent watering, then making this task as easy as possible for yourself means that you are more likely to attend to it. If full watering cans have to be lugged up the entire length of the garden every day during a hot summer, your enthusiasm for this chore will soon wane. By installing a nearby tap or automatic irrigation system, the plants will thrive with much less effort.
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A well-stocked specialist nursery full of mouthwatering horticultural goodies.
Choosing & buying
After inspecting the garden thoroughly, reading through the plant descriptions and making a final decision about what you’d like to grow, the much more exciting task of buying the plants can proceed. There are a couple of things to think about, though, before embarking on the buying expedition. Firstly, where to buy the plants from, and secondly, what size of plants to buy.
Specialist nurseries vs garden centres
Specialist nurseries are great fun to visit. They stock only the plants they are interested in. There’ll be no barbecues, pot-pourri or Christmas decorations in sight – just lots and lots of lovely plants. Nurseries selling architectural plants will be visited by like-minded customers, and experiences and gardening tips can be talked about and shared. The nursery owners and staff can offer expert advice and usually have enough time and enthusiasm to assist with the selection and purchase of any plant required.
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Some plants are much more successful in containers than others.
The staff at nurseries will also be experienced in wrapping and packing awkward or unfamiliar plants, and can usually arrange the delivery of any large specimens that you’re unable to take home yourself. Delivery is normally expertly done by strong young chaps, who are used to dealing with weighty palm trees and giant bamboos. These plants will be delivered to your door and manoeuvred to any part of the garden, as requested.
All in all, specialist nurseries are hard to beat and, because most of the plants are produced on site, the cost is reasonable and the full range of stock is usually available.
However, garden centres shouldn’t be automatically dismissed. Many of them are becoming much more adventurous in the plants they stock, and increasing numbers of architectural plants can be found on their premises. Garden centres are also convenient places for buying compost, garden tools, irrigation equipment, lighting and anything else that might be required for the garden, all of which can be bought at the same time as the plants.
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There’s a wide choice of exciting plants for growing indoors too.
Financial constraints
Gone are the days when everyone lived at the same address for several decades and was able to grow plants from tiny specimens until maturity. Nowadays, many of us are impatient for an ‘instant fix’, and television gardening programmes have encouraged us all to buy large plants for immediate impact. This is fine if your budget is open-ended, in which case buy the largest of everything. Most of us, though, can’t spend our hard-earned cash with such reckless abandon and need to be a bit more cautious.
If your budget is limited, work out from your list of requirements which are the fast-growing plants and which are the slowest. If a plant is a rapid grower, putting on several feet of new growth per season, such as a Eucalyptus, then buying a smaller, cheaper plant makes sense. For plants that are tediously slow, such as palm trees, put as much money as possible into buying a decent-sized specimen. Watching a small palm put on just a few inches of growth per year is a maddeningly frustrating experience, as you know that it will be years before it flourishes enough to become a focal feature in the garden.
One last thing to give some thought to is that some of the larger plants can be extremely heavy and quite tricky to plant. So, there is often the added expense of employing a professional team of capable gardeners to do the hard work for you. It’s a choice between parting with yet more cash or risking personal injury by doing the job yourself.
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Aeonium ‘Schwarzkopf’ is a popular and easy choice for a terracotta pot.
Plants in pots
Growing plants in containers has always been popular, but the difficulties of cultivating plants in this way are often glossed over. Magazine articles and advertisements for conservatories and terracotta pots make it look so easy, and gardeners usually blame themselves when plants become unhealthy or die. But it cannot be overemphasized exactly how unhappy plants can become when forced to spend their lives in such an unnatural environment.
Plants are at least a hundred times happier when planted in the ground, where they belong, than when they are planted in pots.
The roots of plants growing in containers are far nearer the elements than they were designed for, which is tucked away snugly underground. They experience more frost, more heat from the sun and more rain, which doesn’t always drain away quickly enough. So the chances of these plants suffering from freezing, drought and rotting are far higher than if they were growing in the garden. Plant roots also like to spread out, not to be cramped in a small space, which causes the plant additional stress. A stressed plant has reduced resistance to pests and diseases. Plants in containers have to be sprayed for bugs far more often than those in the ground. Insects can detect a weakened plant a mile off and zoom in for the kill with astonishing speed.
The most common cause of failure, however, is lack of water. Watering in the summer is something we all
