Category: Design
How about this simple idea for a bench? Looks like the blocks are cemented together, but I wonder if the bars are fixed to the blocks or is it a bit wobbly?
Old School Gardener
Old School Gardener
My friend ‘Old Nick’ has created this lovely cascade in his garden in Cheshire. I like the proportions and simple, clean lines and colours. Now, what about the planting on that slope above…hanging gardens?
Old School Gardener
The Regal Fern
Many plants cannot tolerate damp, dense shade. But do not despair if your garden has a boggy, dark corner; one group of plants – ferns – relish such a site. Ferneries were popular during the Victorian era so you can create a period piece at the same time.
Choose hardy ferns for example Royal Fern (Osmunda regalis) and the sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis), for the boggiest areas, and Aldiantum venustum – which needs neutral to acid soil- on slightly drier land. Dig rotted manure or compost into the soil before planting. Then enjoy the tender green and bronze- red young leaves, unfurling into rich green mature foliage.
Source and further information:
‘Good Ideas for Your Garden’- Reader’s Digest
A Fern Quiz
Old School Gardener
Styria, Austria
‘Zephirin Drouhin’ looking good this year on a tunnel at Old School Garden
Roses nodding round the front door or along a pergola or trellis make even the plainest house look pretty, but the thorns on stray shoots can scratch people as they go in and out. Combine beauty with safety by choosing a thornless rose like ‘Zephirin Drouhin’; it is a rich pink, perpetual flowering and heavily scented- and has thornless stems.
A lovely rose, and thornless, too
Old School Gardener
Grow climbers up a rendered house (or with another painted surface, like timber boards) on trellis panels fixed to the wall with hinges at the bottom edge and secured by catches at the top. when the wall needs a fresh coat of paint, swing the top of the panel forward just enough to get a paint brush or roller in behind. The main stems at the base are scarcely disturbed.
Old School Gardener
Keukenhof, Holland
‘Why should we imitate wild nature? the garden is a product of civilisation. Why any more make of our gardens imitation of wild nature, than paint our children with woad, and make them run about naked in an effort to imitate nature unadorned? the very charm of a garden is that it is taken out of savagery, trimmed, clothed and disciplined’
S. Baring-Gould 1890
Your views please!
Old School Gardener
Sissinghurst – the Moat Walk
‘In the afternoon I moon about with Vita (Sackville-West) trying to convince her that planning is an element in gardening. I want to show her that the top of the moat-walk bank must be planted with forethought and design. She wishes just to jab in the things which has left over. The tragedy of the romantic temperament is that it dislikes form so much that it ignores the effect of masses. She wants to put in stuff which ‘will give alovely red colour in the autumn’. I wish to put in stuff which will furnish shape to the perspective. In the end we part, not as friends.’
Old School Garden 