Making the Flower Garden: Part One
Before metal touches soil, I need to share with you the original idea for the garden and what methods I used to assess the potential site.
Part One: I had a beautiful dream
What was the origin of the Flower Garden? A dream! I know it may sound a little corny, but it was a very beautiful glowing dream. One of those dreams where you sense that you’re actually smiling in the waking world. When you awaken, you just hope it’s real!
In the dream, the warm evening summer sun was gilding blousy and romantic flowers, illuminating leaves, highlighting the silvered wings of bumblebees and butterflies, while Jacq reaches across a rose and cuts a bloom for the house. Berkeley, our huge and completely soppy flat-coated retriever, treads softly behind, wondering if there is any food in the offering, raising his head and sniffing with every snip of the secateurs…
The dream was so vivd, I could remember the plants and colours and a huge border. There were the pinks of roses, blues of delphiniums, purple foxgloves, and a zesty chartreuse hit from euphorbia. I wrote it all down because I just knew I had to make this garden. There was no question about it… Other than how? And where? Oh, and when?!
The how…
Earlier in the year, I had built the Kitchen Garden. Six timber raised-beds for growing vegetables. I had been following
on YouTube and felt truly inspired to grow my own. His enthusiasm is infectious! Charles is the Godfather of no-dig. A method of cultivating plants without physically cultivating and damaging the soil.The process, in essence, involves layering thick ‘light-excluding’ layer of brown cardboard on the grass or even weedy pasture. On top of this, you lay a thick mulch of compost. You then sow or plant into this compost layer. As the plants grow and cardboard breaks down, the roots penetrate the undisturbed soil biome beneath. Any vegetation below the cardboard dies off and their collective decomposition gives further nutrition and life to the soil. After one growing season, the boundary between mulch and soil is barely distinguishable.
In case you’re wondering, it works! It really works! And no back-breaking double digging. No mass cultivation. You simply let nature do the heavy-lifting, where worms and countless other organisms slowly but steadily incorporate the nutrient-laden organic matter into the soil, increasing bio-availability and nutrient uptake for plants, thanks to the extraordinarily complex soil-wide-web.
This is the foundation. There is nuance, as there always is with gardens. No two gardens are the same. Even adjacent gardens can vary in moisture retention, nutrients, light and shadow, drainage, etc. But the principal method works across soil conditions, from clay to chalk and everything in between.
The where…
This was easy. The Cottage Garden at the front was made. The Kitchen Garden to the side was made. The Courtyard was too small, as was the Terrace Garden. This left one big open space at the rear.
The blankest page
I’m not sure you could have found more of a blank page than this. An area, laid with turf, edged with timber boards, surrounded with a gravel path and stark close board fencing. It was as empty, cheerless, and as lifeless as you can imagine. Only the grass qualified it as a ‘garden’, otherwise it would be a yard… or a car park!
In fairness, this bleak lawn was only the temporary solution after we cleared the neglected garden that we had inherited. It was unintentionally visionary! I’m not exactly known for my powers of foresight… However, we were not gardeners then, but I had just the slightest inkling that we might be.
Of more immediate concern, right then and there, was the need for a safe space for two huge hounds to bound about like nutters and somewhere to leave their unmentionables. It was also a great place for our nephew to play football, but mainly for the dogs to run amok.
By the time I was ready to make more of a garden here, Berkeley was in his dotage and ‘running amok’ was growing increasingly rare. He was more into sunbathing, sleeping, exploring and sauntering, following Jacq as she picks flowers for the house, or takes tea and biscuits to a bench. It breaks my heart all over again to say Berkeley would only see two more summers. I do hope he enjoyed himself, rolling on the plants and sniffing bees.
The when…
Frankly, money was an issue. Things were very tight. Covid had put us both out of work and unable to return, for a while at least. But over the previous years we had fostered that insatiable appetite for gardening. If I was to make a garden, without a massive spend on plants, I needed time. Time to propagate cuttings and seedlings.
I pencilled in ‘New garden!’ in the new year calendar. This gave me the summer and autumn to sow and grow. It was just enough time. Meanwhile, I would assess the site, the ground, the light, take stock, question my sanity, then research, research, research!
The lie of the land
Grabbing the garden design playbook, I’m ticked off: Light, aspect, exposure, and soil. Let’s take them one by one…
Follow the sun
Let there be LIGHT, hopefully! I have a handy-dandy app called PhotoPills. Within the multitude of tools is the Sun Tracker with augmented reality. Sounds funky! Basically, you hold up your phone and it takes your global position and displays the path of the sun, on screen, mapped over your camera view. Nifty! Change the date and you can see where the sun will be in the sky, at any time of year. Move around your garden and you’ll see when the sun will strike the area literally at any moment in time. Ruddy marvellous!
With this little gadget I accurately mapped out the light and shadows, concluding that this would be a Full Sun garden, i.e. receiving more than six hours of direct sun, between late March and the end of October. Outside of these months, the shadow from the hill and house would creep down and engulf the entire garden, leaving just the potting shed to glow in the winter sunshine.
Note: If you see a plant in the garden centre and it’s labelled as “Full Sun”, just know that this means it requires over 6 hours of direct sun, ideally 8+, measured during summer. Less than six hours and the plant may not flower as freely. In some cases the reaction to low light is extreme and the plant will literally lean to find more light
Follow the compass
Flowing neatly on the path of light, is the ASPECT. Which direction of the compass do we face? This impacts where the sun strikes the ground, for how long, directly affecting temperatures, shadows, moisture, etc. A south facing garden is hot and dry. East has morning sun and afternoon shade. West has morning shade and afternoon and evening sun. (This garden is in the UK, 51°North)
My cottage sits on the northern slopes of the Wessex Downs. This site is technically north facing, which suggests cooler temperature and lots of shadow. Yet this space, is mostly open to the south and west. An interesting proposition. It would, in effect, be a hot and sunny site. I would just need to take care when positioning tall plants, assessing how they shade out their neighbours.
Follow the weather
Following on from Aspect, also rather neatly, is the EXPOSURE aka the local climate. Is the site open to freezing biting winds or westerly gales? Salty air? Are there frost pockets? On the north eastern and eastern boundary there is a huge hedgerow, so we are sheltered from the particularly cold wintry blasts. The site is also fairly well protected by the house on the southern side.
The only opening to any strong winds is to the west and this, for most of the UK, is from where the majority of gales blow. However, we have a large silver birch and, together with the neighbour’s trees, they form a rather handy wind break with a diffusing belt of branches.
When I cultivated the first garden here, I had assumed that, being on the north side of a hill, we would be subject to intense frosts. But this isn’t the case. The cold air is always flowing down hill and away from us. So yes, there are frosts, but very rarely are they deep and penetrating.
Curiously, as most of the garden is in complete shade between November and February, it may remain relatively cold, but our plants don’t suffer from ‘frost and thaw’ damage. We lose very few plants to ice. As it’s a naturally dry site, even dahlias (tubers) and half-hardy salvias like ‘Amistad’ survive the winters. Often, it’s the combination of wet soils and icy conditions that kill the more tender plants.
Follow the worms
Ooofff! Was this the deal breaker? It all looked so promising! Then I looked at the SOIL… At first attempt, I could barely get the spade into the ground to make a test hole (pit). Years of sun-baked turf laid on top of compacted ground - from the heavy machinery brought in to clear the ground originally.
Across the lawn I eventually carved out several test holes. What was I looking for? I was testing for drainage, taking soil pH samples, looking at whether it was sandy, chalky, or clay? Any thought of ‘loam’ was absolutely laughable.
I discovered there was roughly 15-20cm (6-8in) of fairly decent topsoil. Probably the soil that was brought in to make the lawn. It was dry, open and crumbly with some worm activity, lots of leatherjackets and ants. Plenty of those! No mycelia though. Beneath the topsoil, a very hard compaction layer, littered with stones and bits of paving. Joy! It was so hard I needed to use a massive chisel-ended wrecking bar to break through.
Below that, another 15-20cm (6-8in) of sticky grey soil. It was Alkali. Alkali is a strongly alkaline clay giving a near black pH 8.5+! Beneath this, about 0.5m (20in) down from the surface, I hit the calcareous substrate. A dense grey chalky layer. Extreme alkalinity is one issue. Potentially, the bigger issue was drainage.
Alkali
Alkali soil has an inherently low filtration capacity, i.e. waterlogging and stagnation. Although generally rich in calcium and magnesium, they’re poor in other nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates - notable essentials for healthy plant growth. So, not a great situation, but mostly redeemable.
Besides, it wasn’t entirely unexpected. It’s all over my garden. Probably the entire vale. There isn’t a rhododendron for about 30 miles! What was unexpected is the variation in topsoil depth. In some areas, the test hole drops 50cm (20in) before I hit the hard chalky layer. In a few isolated spot, it’s just deep, dark, rich loamy soil all the way!
(Later, I discovered that a portion of my garden was actually part of the old village allotments! Hence the lovely soil! Wish there was more!)
Drainage
Having encountered the alkali clay, I needed to test the drainage, so I filled the test holes with water and monitored how long it took to drain away. Again a wide range of results here, with no obvious reason. A couple of test holes took an entire day to drain. Others, the water drained out almost as quickly as I filled it, which is a little weird. On average, drainage took 30-60mins which, for the amount of water filling each hole, is fast!
(Poor: Less than 2cm/hr | Good: 2-7cm/hr | Well-drained: 10cm+/hr)
The bottom of many of the test holes did puddle, but this was down in the alkali clay layer, so not surprising. What interested me was that the majority of the water drained laterally. This is a good thing! (Yes, I actually sat and watched the water drain. What can I say? I lead an exciting life!)
The majority of plants send out their feeding and drinking roots laterally. Even tap-rooted plants where one or two thick roots travel deep to access moisture and nutrients, still have lateral roots. In my garden, tap-roots will find the clay. So, with those few tapped exceptions, most plant roots won’t travel deeper than 50cm (20in), instead growing into the well drained layer above.
Test hole results
Very strongly alkaline, good to well-drained topsoil, to varying depths. I went with the assumption that it was nutritionally poor, being imported topsoil. I figured that with regular mulching, I could enrich the soil, bring up the organic matter and nutrients, making it alive and kicking!
The deeper layer of poor-draining alkali might be an issue in winters where extreme rainfall causes ground saturation. However, this is countered somewhat by the significant slope of the hill drawing the water away. The lawn was never waterlogged. I took some reassurance in that.
Summing up…
With all my measuring and testing, digging holes and wandering around with my phone pointing at the sun, I had a firm idea of the conditions…
This garden is sheltered, hot and dry! Protected from strong winds in practically every direction, yet open to the baking afternoon sunshine. Receiving well over six hours of direct sunshine, the garden is ‘full sun’ with part shade areas under the trees.
Speaking of trees, the large birch (to the west) and ash tree (to the east) might pose a few issues as they’re always going to be drawing moisture and nutrients with their extensive shallow roots.
The light direction is great for a punchy and colourful summer garden, but there’s little point on planting for the winter as we’re not going to have low winter sunlight setting behind the garden, illuminating grasses, for example. With the sun so strong, I’ll need bolder colours as pastels will bleach.
The summer heat (when we get it), light levels, and soil conditions are all suitable for mediterranean plant selections. Conclusion: This site is packed with potential!
Coming up…
Now my focus turns to the plants. Cue the ‘Planterlust’. As with most home gardeners, professionalism goes straight out of the potting shed window when I think about plants. Here I try focussing solely on the calcicoles, calciphytes or calciphiles - the lime loving plants!
A thoroughly enjoyable read Elliott. Thank you.