South Milford & Lumby

North Yorkshire

Grass Roots

Hints and tips - mature garden

Planning your garden on a slope can be a tricky operation. It is not easy to fit in paths, steps, walls and areas that are to be actively used. Without a tumble drier you still need space for a rotary clothes line which might be even more critical during the winter.
Existing natural landscape features have great value for they may have taken many years to reach their present size. Fruit trees, having outgrown their use and taste, may still have a place; act as protective screening from the site next door, as a frame for views from the house, give protection from the prevailing wind or used as a basis for the support of more adept plants which require a framework on which to grow and which in the process provide an almost instant screen.
Not all house owners like to see their plants being taken advantage of in other people’s gardens. In one case, a while back, the evergreen Clematis armandii had wandered over the boundary and quickly climbed towards the light and made itself at home in the surrounding cupressus and birch trees. That spring it presented a magnificent flower show in the garden next door. I just could not help but show this good client the fruits of this magnificent climber. Talk about green walls; this would have put any architect’s planning to shame! The trouble was the client ‘wanted it in their garden’ and so after flowering this beautiful sheet of blossom was torn down and that part of the climber disappeared for ever.
It does go to show you what can be done in your own garden where you have fences, trellis and walls and the odd redundant fruit or ornamental tree which can be used to support new plants. Gardens need not be big to be successful. I have seen magnificence in ‘postage stamps’. The ingenuity comes in the ideas, that we can think up in clothing difficult to maintain areas of ground or raising the vertical garden which can be appreciated at both the ground floor and first floor levels and using the roof’s of existing buildings to support a ‘garden off the ground’.
Green roof’s and green walls are the in thing at the moment, not only in a bid to create added visual amenity but to create an apposing factor to global warming. Where you have trees and greenery so you get their affect of cooling caused by the evaporation of moisture from the plant cooling the surrounding atmosphere.
Green walls are already part of an established technique on the Continent, North America, Australia and the Far East. Buildings blend well in Norway with their forestry background and their green roove’s of pine and silver birch. A feature of the new Olympic site in London will be green walls but this is very much on the grand scale.
If you come up with any ideas in your garden, let me know. Remember having got it up there you then must have the means of watering and feeding it. Plant species have to suit their surroundings and the situation and be of a nature by which they can be maintained and of course be pest and disease free. When you come to the weeding this is certainly no place for a kneeler!

Yorkshire Landscape Gardens
dave@daviddmitchell.co.uk