A sneak preview of the planting

It takes me just over two hours to get to Wildly Rural to meet up with David the owner. The weather gets better and better as I drive into the deepest corners of Cumbria to Kirksanton where they are based, and where I have planned to spend a blissful day in the warm sunshine messing about with plants, perfect!

Have you ever read those car reviews where the manufacturer disguises the outline of the car they are testing? Well, it was a bit like that with my planting. You’ll see in these pictures the overall effect that I want to create but we had to have a few ‘stand ins’ for grasses that are not quite ready yet and the perennials that are being supplied by Ladybrook Nursery. So although you think you can tell what it is, its not quite the finished article. You’ll have to come to the show to see that!

We use the grid on the textile ground cover of the nursery floor to mark out in chalk the different beds within my design to the correct dimensions. Its illuminating to see the scale of my garden like this, giving me the first indication of how it will look in reality. We place the appropriate grasses around the space to create the look that I am aiming for, and make note of which plants go with each other and how many fit in the spaces. The first bed takes us almost two hours to complete, as we make lots of tweaks to keep it looking naturalistic and random, which is much harder that it sounds. By the time we set out the last bed, we take only half an hour as we’re cooking on gas and have the plant plan formula all worked out. I add two smaller grasses to the plant plan, as I decide that these are useful fillers to hide large pots and create swathes of lower planting between taller plants.

David’s initial suggestion was for 120 plants in 7.5 litre pots but I may need to up this quantity, as I want to create a mass of texture and movement with the grasses, with only the flower heads of the perennials appearing in small bursts of colour. My next task is to make sense of the sketches and numbers I scribble down and calculate a close approximation of the number of plants that I need.

“I’m now as close as I’ll ever be to a finished planting plan but I just hope that I can replicate all of this again when the plants eventually get to site!”