Planting up to Assessment

Placing out boundary plants

Today I am joined by Caroyln and Ali who work extremely hard preparing the awful clay and rubble soil to receive the plants. As the main trees are now in I decide to concentrate on the area of planting along the front boundary which is mainly greens and whites. Chris visits twice today and kindly offers plants from the Furzey Garden he has been planting on the Chelsea site. I gratefully accept some yellow Aquilegia, pink Geranium and ferns.

He also suggests that I source another larger tree to replace the two small Betula that didn't come into leaf in time. This sends me off looking for unused trees on site as well as getting photos and quotes from tree nurseries, which all prove expensive to deliver one tree. I find a 3 metre multi stemmed Betula pendula near the Majestic trees site and after a bit of investigation work discover it wasn't used by a trade stand and they are happy to sell it to me. Relief!

The next day I am joined by Gill and Julie, (the planting team all belong to the Maidenhead Society of Garden Designers cluster group). They steadily work through the rest of the boundary plants trying to replicate the layout of plants that I place out for them, but which proves hard each time you have to move them to dig the solid soil. Another time (!!!!) I would certainly remove a pots depth of soil and then replace this with imported quality soil. The weather is being very kind and is warm but not raining or blisteringly hot.On the last day of planting I am relieved to be joined by two strong men; my husband James and Andrew who dig the last tree hole and rapidly plant the last batch of plants, as well as painting the plywood surround for the storage area behind my garden.

Meanwhile I arrange and then plant out the inner section of colourful plants that feature in the area around the tree stump in the centre of the garden. I decide to balance out the colourful perspex sculpture by placing plants of similar bright reds (Geum Mrs Bradshaw), oranges (Geum Princess Juliana) and yellows (Aquilegia) diagonally opposite. This is then re balanced with a small area of the same colour combination directly beneath. The colour pallet then moves around the back of the stump into bright pink Digitalis purpurea, violet Hesparis, swinging down to blue purple Geranium Mayflower, softer pink Pimpinella rosea, then into deeper purple Aquilegia alpina which contrasts with the yellow Stylophorum lasiocarpum in the foreground.

Now I just need the sun to come out and all the flowers to bloom! Chris makes a couple more suggestions to the planting; add a touch of blue Geranium in amongst the front green and white which I agree lifts it and can be described to the assessors as an 'echo'. Also to add Betula saplings to the colourful planting, to suggest regeneration.