Spring Garden Inspiration
After a completely manic few months I had the pleasure of time off last week and travelled to Devon where I parked the car and didn’t get back into it for a week. Lots of country walks and spring garden inspiration …
Wild plants in hedgerows
Spring hedgerows
Firstly the amazing hedgerows with wild plants – wild garlic and bluebells were the most striking.
Wild garlic and bluebells
I made pesto from the former and drooled over carpets of the latter! Do make sure when you buy bluebells for yout spring garden that you get the English natives (Hyacinthoides non-scripta, lovely dark blue and drooping rather than the more upright and thuggish Spanish varieties Hyacinthoides hispanica).
An alternative for gardens that is one of my personal absolute favourites is Camassia leichtlinii or the smaller Camassia quamash– out now and doing the job of a tall bluebell but with less foliage covering the ground. Worth buying in bulk for naturalising and shoving in amongst other planting to find its way – these will do in sun or part shade and prefer it moist in the Spring (but can be somewhere that gets dry in the summer)
Spring garden inspiration with mown paths
The other real spring garden inspiration was seeing a number of people had done wonders in their shady gardens with mown paths. A nod to a wild flower meadow but rather more naturalistic and really very effective. You can see that simply bulking up a bit of the colour in the sections you leave to grow longer works really well without much in the way of complex mowing regimes.
The images below are actually from Highgrove as I couldn’t get good pictures without climbing up on fences, but the inspiration was very much the wilder valley gardens of Dartmouth!
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