In an inclement and dark winter month it’s a delight to look at the colourful photos I have taken over the years of “Long Borders;” all visited in the brighter light of summer or early autumn as the light levels here currently are very low indeed. Here are a few. A traditional early summer herbaceous border at Hindringham Hall Norfolk:
Not quite a double herbaceous border at East Rushton Old Vicarage on a wet day in early June – the left-hand border is a bit too narrow!!): –
A later summer planting at RHS Wisley in one side of their double long borders – with himself for scale, and then a closer view of the planting: –
So, to my Long Border. You may recall that I had determined that it should be a good 13m long, and 3m deep, going across the width of the “new” wider bit of the garden we had bought from next door (effectively the bottom half of their garden). (All the photos above are of MUCH bigger borders than that!) As we garden on an east facing slope the 1.5m high retaining gabion wall we built into the hillside so that we could have a flat patio to sit on and look over the new border meant that the shadow it cast in front of it would put quite a lot of the long border in continuous shade if it had been placed directly in front of it. This “problem,” if you recall, had given me the opportunity to put in a metre deep x 13m long fern bed to take advantage of this shade.
Here it is a few months after planting up in 2020: –
To ensure the Long Border was not in the shadow of the gabion wall we now planned a 30” (.762m!) paved path in front of the fern bed, with the Long Border the other side of that. This path was not going to be a utility path at the back of the Long Border for gardening purposes like traditional Herbaceous or Long Borders it was a bona fide garden path two paving slabs wide. (Well, EVENTUALLY it would be, to begin with it was just a 30” tamped down chalk path). Here’s the utility path under the hedge behind the herbaceous border at the top of the photo in Hindringham Hall: –
This photo neatly shows you what I consider to be the main definition of an herbaceous border – the tall hedge (or brick wall) behind to show off the border, with a narrow path (often bark chippings or stepping stones) behind for access purposes for the gardener, and a line of paving at the front of the border for ease of grass cutting. The garden visitor walks along only one edge of the border, even the seeming path between the two halves of this bed is only a utility one for the gardener to get to the back without having to walk more than 15 yards in both directions to get to a particular patch.
However, having a “proper” path between the fern bed and the Long Border meant that the Long Border was now going to be an Island Bed (!) not a traditional Herbaceous Border with just a front edge for walking along admiring the planting like the photos at the top of this piece; where taller/bigger things were placed at the back, wispy things or shorter things at the front. It now had TWO edges to be viewed from, as well as being seen from above on the patio. A shot from Kingston Lacy illustrates this well, showing both an herbaceous border at the right of shot, and huge island beds centrally: –
Here’s a shot of the area before any work started to show you what we were dealing with: –
Never mind all that, you may be thinking, how do you get DOWN to fern bed level if the patio/gabion wall is 1.5m high? If the fern bed is 1 m wide, the new path 76.2cm, THEN the side edge of the Long Border starts, how do you bridge that height difference? In that short a distance. We planned large, wide steps, such that two people could walk down them side by side. They would have to go past the start of the edge of the new border but would reach ground level before the front edge of the bed. Let me show you: –
This clearly shows you the flat chalk surface dug out for the paved path to be in front of the fern bed (and what the “soil” was like that the Long Border would be sitting on. This is phase one of the steps; they would continue on past what is laid out.
Here we’ve put in footings for some of the steps, and you can see how wide the path in front of the fern bed will be. Next, the steps have started: –
And here they are coming on: –
The paving slabs we used are recycled ones from our neighbour’s patio when he decided to have it repaved, which when I cleaned them up were almost the same colour as the old slabs we planned to use for the path by the ferns. We had always intended to have steps down at this point, with some sort of stepping off point for me to get behind the new border on the utility path. Once it became a “posh” path, we made the step from which you turned to go down it a double paving slab – i.e. two slabs deep, so that it mirrored the width of the path it was joining. Initially, there were just a couple of breeze blocks to step down on, so that they, and the paving could be laid together.
Another visual aspect was that now this was a garden path, you were walking along it looking at the fence with next door, and the top of their shed behind it. When it was going to be an herbaceous border, I planned to paint the fence black, so that the plants in the border stood out. But now you were walking 4m higher up the garden, the shed really stood out, and I felt that we needed a different solution.
When we were at Beth Chatto’s garden in June 2019, we had been very taken with a clump forming evergreen bamboo, called Fargesia scabrida, pictured here: –
So, we created a bed at the far end of the fern bed against the fence, to finish in line with the front of the yet to be created Long Border and ordered 4 plants online. Here is the space, the enriched soil, and the plants going in: –
Eventually this bed was edged with scaffolding boards to retain the soil. As the fence line follows the slope of our hillside, you can see how much the Long Border would slope down. We have a water butt on the patio above which all the shed water drains into – and generally, we have the tap at the bottom of it open, and a hose pipe attached to drain into either the fern bed, or mainly now the bamboo bed. These bamboo have grown very happily indeed, here after one year: –
They are now a complete hedge taller than the fence (thus hiding the shed), and a lovely green backdrop to the Long Border. Here’s a shot from almost the same position a further two years later, during a heatwave, which shows what a good evergreen doer it is: –
This seems like a good pause point, more on developing the Long Border next month. Let’s finish with a few photos from the only dry day this week! Firstly, Snowdrops and Aconites (Galanthus nivalis and Eranthis hyemalis): –
And then two shots of crocus – taken as it always amuses me that casual garden visitors assume that these are two different types of plant, as “the leaves” are so different, as they disregard the grass-like crocus leaves, assuming they are weeds, and focus on a) the geum leaves and b) the cyclamen hederifolium leaves that the Crocus tommasiniamus are coming up through:-
Sheila May
