In Bed with your Garden

Designing a Home Garden

The most frequent question asked by our visitors to the gardens is "Did you have plans with plants to be planted and their situations and where you intended to place the garden beds?" A perfectly good question which I always find hard to answer. I feel embarrassed to reply, "No, not really. Like Topsy it just grows." When we first started to shape the beds, Kees had not retired and was working every day with architectural plans and he kept on insisting that I should set down on paper my plans for the creation of our Garden of Eden and not just blindly dig holes and hope for the best. You can read my reaction by clicking here .

Have I learnt anything over the next thirteen years? Well, I have realised that I have a natural talent of instinctively knowing where a plant will flourish. From the enormous number of garden books I have absorbed, I have learnt where plants originated and the climate and soil they prefer and a good plan to follow is to try to give your new plants those conditions in your garden. I have learnt the importance of planting the new shrub or perennial amongst compatible neighbours. After all, if I had to live in very close proximity to folk I did not get on with, I would do my best to move away and find a better position to lay down my roots. I am lucky enough for this not to be a problem in my life. Ever since I was a very young girl, I have lived in a home with complete privacy. If I feel like rushing outside in my nightdress, to see if an exciting flower has opened at long last, there is no one glancing over the fence to raise their eyebrows or tut-tut

Speaking of nighties, brings me to the difficult problem of the creation of the garden beds. I have read many times that if you don't want straight garden beds, the trick is to throw a garden hose in a careless circle and reach for your spade and dig that shape in the pristine ground. This we did, in the beginning of the creation of the gardens at "Kibbenjelok". Of course, the garden hose could not look under the first few inches of top soil and see old tree stumps or a hard pan of rock. Our country garden is a very large garden and now has many garden beds. What has happened to those hose shaped gardens? A lot of transformation has appeared over the years. With my avid desire to have every tree, shrub or perennial that I fall in love with, beds have had to be enlarged, joined together [with a secret path that we may use for weeding] abolished or have a walking path through the middle.

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