The White garden - Part 13 of our garden makeover

Garden transformation Part 13 – Flowers at last!

When I first started gardening, all my favourite flowers were white. Although as like many newbie gardeners, I initially relied on other gardeners giving me free plants that they had split. These were of course made up of all colours and I soon came to appreciate the importance of colour in the garden.

Now I can’t imagine the garden without the areas of bright contrasting colours. I certainly wouldn’t have contemplated a white garden unless I had space for both.

You get so much inspiration from other gardeners and when the late Christopher Lloyd started appearing regularly on Gardeners World from his beautiful gardens at Great Dixter. My eyes were properly opened with his philosophy of breaking the conventional rules on colour combinations.

Now that we’ve regained our appreciation of wild flower meadows, you can see that in the wild all colours mix happily.

There has however always been a special place in my heart for white flowers. When I first saw the white garden at Sissinghurst Castle on the TV, it recaptured my love for them and I knew if I ever got the chance I would create a white area.

April 2015 – The white garden is born, in my head

Nearly two years after moving in, my husband started to clear the very end of the garden. As soon as this was done I knew this dappled spot under the walnut tree was going to be my tiny bit of Sissinghurst, my white garden.

As I’ve alluded to many times now in this garden transformation series, we set about building a rather long (160ft) garden wall, referred to jokingly as The Great Wall.

We build the one end of the wall to full height up by the house, then started building at the very end of the garden, initially it was only a few feet high. Our plan was to get the foundations in for the whole length of the wall, and built above ground level as soon as possible. That way our garden and our neighbour’s gardens could be put straight.

October 2016 – The great wall is finally completed

Once the wall was complete we could actually start to landscape the garden. I had drawn a plan years earlier and knew exactly what it was going to look like. Now was the time to start turning our building site into a garden.

November 2016 –

We started at the very end. The compost bins were going to be there and we had built a log store area into the wall, so we would need a proper path. We lined the edges with old solid red bricks that we’d brought with us – we knew they’d come in handy!

Next we put a few inches of crush and run down, and to compact it hired a whacker plate from Griffith tool hire. They are an excellent local family run business that we have used for many years.

We had decided on stone paving slabs, but there was no point in starting on that until the rest of the paths, further down the garden were at the same stage.

December 2016 – Soil refining

We have beautiful soil here, unfortunately it has equal amounts of stone in it!

As a result, everywhere that we want to grow any plants, it has to be sieved through our homemade riddle.

We (by which I mean my husband) dig down approximately 12-18 inches, shovel it onto the riddle, then put back the soil and take the stones to our recycling centre – accept for the attractive pebbles that I save.

This is obviously very hard work, but will pay dividends in the future!

January 2017 – The first flowers to be planted in the garden!!!

Well what can I say, total excitement! January isn’t necessarily the best time to be planting flowers, but I’d already waited 3 years and 5 months (who’s counting) for this moment. So I wasn’t going to wait any longer! Obviously I had to pick my plants carefully, but luckily the aptly named Christmas Rose ‘Helleborus’ are at their best.

April 2017 – I have my Sissinghurst!

We continued work on the white garden through February and March, refining the soil on both sides of the path. As we have the holly hedge to cut on the right-hand side I planted perennials that would die down in the winter.

Digitalis ‘Snow Thimble’ and Allium ‘Mount Everest’

On the left-hand side however we have the, no maintenance wall, allowing us to plant shrubs.

The white rhododendron was here when we came (free), the poor thing was smothered with weeds. We dug it up and moved it to a temporary home, where it immediately started to thrive. In March we dug it up with a huge root ball, lifted it onto our hard working trolley and wheeled it up to its new permanent home.

My mum bought me Spiraea ‘Arguta’ (Bridal wreath) over twenty years ago, knowing how much I liked white flowers. It had lived in a large pot and never really grown very much. Once it was planted into our newly sieved soil it has gone mad, flowering profusely each year, a real delight.

By April it was all finished accept for the stone topping that didn’t get done for a further 5 months.

Shopping for white plants

I spent many happy hours on the internet researching white flowing plants, ‘Alba’ as most of them are known. I was surprised how many white variants there were. I often feel like a child in a sweet shop when looking at nursery’s online. But nothing can make up for visiting them. If you’re anything like me, I carefully pick up half a dozen plants then spend ages turning them round and around trying to decide which one is the best.

We have a wonderful nursery not too far away that’s been going since 1910 and is still family run. They started out growing and selling fruit trees but have long since diversified. It doesn’t open on a Sunday, or have a fancy shop or café, just good plants at reasonable prices. A gardener’s paradise.

One day my husband had phoned me from work and I said “that’s lucky you’ve just caught me I’m going to Morreys”, he said “on your own? Don’t get a trolley!”

Of course there wouldn’t have been any point in going if I didn’t get a trolley and I filled the car again.

The White Garden is now thriving

The whole white garden is doing really well. The white thalictrum gets taller and more impressive every year, with its mass of delicate little flowers. The alliums ‘Mount Everest’ are multiplying nicely, their dried structural skeletons stay in place until I pick them out in spring ready for the new ones to appear.

Thalictrum splendide white (‘Fr21034’) (PBR)

The white fuchsia ’Hawkshead’ actually flowered until Christmas last year – it’s possibly my favourite plant in the white garden, but as I’m saying that, I’m wobbling thinking of all the others, snowdrops, crocus, foxgloves, lupins, aquilegia………

My favourite time in the white garden is early in the morning and evening when the light’s low, the flowers look like they’re lit up they’re so bright.