Celebrating gardens, photography and a creative life
Today, I’m featuring gardens that use birch trees to great effect. Flower lovers sometimes overlook trees, but if you can imagine these gardens without their chalky trunks, you’ll take away more than you might anticipate. Our eyes would hunger for them, were they absent. Continue reading “Using Birch in the Garden for Light, Rhythm and Texture”
The longer we linger in gardens and green spaces, the more we value a place to sit. Over the last 18 months one of our most useful garden accessories, the bench, has been widely used and appreciated as never before.
I’m celebrating wooden benches that range in character from beautifully finished to rough-hewn and from classic to contemporary, by way of quirky and downright artsy. If your imagination works this way, try removing the bench from one pictures and replacing it with another. Garden furniture is more than just practical: the style of each bench alters the way we see its surroundings. Continue reading “Wooden Garden Benches: Smooth and Rough-Hewn, Traditional and Modern”
Some of you may remember seeing the Santa Rita ‘Living La Vida 120’ Garden at RHS Hampton Court Flower Show a few years ago. Alan Rudden’s design won a Gold medal and Best World Garden. Boldly coloured burnt-yellow steel feature walls, chunky gabion walls of bright rough stone and seven pollarded strawberry trees (Arbutus unedo) were memorable features. Continue reading “Santa Rita Garden, Painting With Wine and Just Asking”
Water laps almost up to an expanse of high quality oak decking, but we hardly see it because our eyes travel between the flowers and the seating area. The plants in the foreground include a mix of lilac scabious and agastache, red achillea and the glaucous leaves of cerinthe major (honeywort). Continue reading “Raised By Rivers Garden Designed By Nicola Oakey”
I often share a series of images taken in a particular garden, but today, I’m leading you through a succession of green landscapes. You’d need a week to explore them all in real life, to say nothing of the seasons, but while we can only travel virtually, why not make the best of it? Continue reading “Life In Colour: A Green Journey”
I’m sharing a dozen garden paths we can imagine strolling up as (almost) a final hurrah for Becky’s January Squares.
They include angular paths and curved ones, wide and narrow paths, dominant ones and paths so unassuming we barely notice they’re there, in quite a range of materials, too. I’ll let the pictures do the talking: Continue reading “Up The Garden Path”
A border is a cultivated area of land set aside for growing decorative plants. Mixed borders combine different types of plants in one place: trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, grasses, bulbs and climbers on obelisks or against a wall. Anything you like to grow can be included – if you want to accessorise it with a birdhouse or seat or some form of artwork, so much the better!
Because there isn’t a fixed recipe, mixed borders are versatile and popular. You may well be one of millions of gardeners worldwide who are tending one. Continue reading “What is a Mixed Border?”
Susan Rushton 