Gardening Time

• Keen amateur gardener James Iles shares his passion for gardening in his regular column. james.iles@bullivantmedia.com

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• • • Mid July in the garden

      Pinch out any diagonal shoots on your tomato plants so it focuses energy on trusses and their fruit.

      Keep new and young plants well-watered.

    • Plant autumn-flowering bulbs.

      Pinch out runner beans when they reach the top of their canes.

      Lift new potatoes, onions and garlic.

      Pick raspberries and currants.

      There’s still time to... Fill any gaps in borders with bedding plants.

    • Share your tips with other readers in Gardening Time by emailing james.iles@bullivantmedia.com
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• A formal affair

• FACED with an ill-thought out and frankly boring front garden left behind by our housebuilders I took the plunge for a complete overhaul recently.

  It is a duo of borders split by the front path, more wide than deep, which I wanted to keep fairly low maintenance.

  And, after much debate in the Iles household over which form of design to go for, my wife and I agreed on a formal garden design.

  Dating back to the 16th century such classical and intricate designs were originally found in stately manors however, not having ideas above our station, we have scaled down these grandiose planting schemes for our more modern and definitely more modest home.

  The most important aspect of formal designs has to be the low-hedging, of which Box is the most popular choice though Euonymus and lavenders are also possibilities to create a contrasting look, particulary the interlocking effect of a knot garden.

  Parterre designs on the other hand use tightly clipped hedging which boast a definite symmetry with feature plants within them, though they were not always necessary given the grand effect of clever hedging and pathways.

  Indeed, it is the hedgework itself that is the star of these styles.

  Our eventual choice was more of a midway point between Knot and parterre as we wanted a interwoven hedge design but feature plants within the spaces too. The aim was to have a classical look on a smaller scale.

  We chose the box hedge Buxus Sempervirens, as it has the formal look but is also evergreen and doesn’t mind the slightly shaded position of our north east facing garden.

  It is relatively low maintenance too depending on how specific you want to be about clipping it into shape. Limited by space I opted for symmetrical chevron shapes within either border complemented by a defined perimeter hedge, all planted in the box.

  This has given the effect of three triangles on either side - the biggest ones being in the middle.

  I first measured the perimeter lengths and then the diagonals and added it up before dividing the total length in metres by 20.

  This is because box plants need to go in at a rate of five to a metre to form an eventual tight hedge.

  At a total length of 24 metres it required some 120 plants in all, which, given the cost, has been achieved using junior plants each of up to 10cm in height.

  They should take a few years to establish a definite hedge but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

  Next, I chose lavenders to create a contrasting knot effect in the corners of the main triangles of the hedging.

  Again, to keep costs down, I went for nursery plants, using six lots of five lavender plug plants in five different varieties. They formed semi-circular lines within the three corners of each of the two main triangles - five plants in each curve.

  The five lavender varieties I used were ‘Blue rider’ (lilac-blue) x10, ‘Kew Red’(maroon-pink), ‘Hidcote’, ‘Munstead’ (both purple-blue) and ‘Rosea ‘(pink), all x5.

  The less complicated part of the design was to choose some top perennials to fill out the four smaller triangles between my box plants.

  I planted in threes using the fabulous Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna'> seen in Andy Sturgeon’s Best in Show garden from Chelsea 2010 with its bee-attracting purple-blue spires.

  Heuchera Obsidian (maroon) and Heuchera Marmalade (orange-pink) as well as the gorgeous smelling Lavandula Tiara with its cream-blue flowers completed my four choices.

  The Pièce de résistance of the whole project is a pair of old or Gallic roses. I went for the fragrant, deep crimson-purple blooms of Tuscany Superb (a David Austin cultivar) which finished the symmetry of the design and dotted some perennial Icelandic poppies either side of each of them.

  Standard box or bay trees or conical box specimens might not have been a bad choice either, if less colour.

  Finally, some smaller perennials - two specimens of each of the orange Hieracium aurantiacum, better known as ‘fox and cubs’ , Astrantia‘Major Star of Billion’ with its pink-white flowers and the cream-lemon petals of the tickseed Coreopsis verticillata ‘Moonbeam’ - slotted in nicely into the six ‘cheese’ shapes created within the corners of the main triangles by my lavender ‘knot’.

  I then mulched it with Strulch , a fairly new organic product used at the Eden Project and RHS gardens, as recommended by BBC Gardener's World.

  It is basically a mineralised straw mulch which is supposed to last up to two years, spreading and have less environmental impact than other mulches with greater results. I will wait and see...

  Our parterre-cum-knot formal style garden didn’t cost the earth to create but the biggest extravagance was definitely the box hedging given the quantity needed for even our humble front garden.

  No wonder they were the preserve of wealthy estates in years gone by!

  I can only imagine how expensive it must have been to fill hectares of landscape with them, let alone just a few metres’ worth like ours.

  However, being evergreen and given their interesting design, they are a year-round feature in themselves and there is the point of basing the design around them.

  It should be well worth it in my opinion once it’s all established in a couple of years and it just goes to show you can make even a small garden look grand.