Garden borders and structure - don't miss out on this easy win! Lessons from Cloudehill gardens

Garden structure is the permanent elements of your garden and how they interact with each other. It's your walls and fences, your evergreen trees and your deciduous trees, it's your evergreen hedges and shrubs, it's the paths, the patios, the arches and the pergolas and even the pots and it has been described as what's left in the garden when everything dies back for winter and that's why we're often urged to have good garden structure so that you've got something to look at in the winter. However I've just visited Cloud Hill, a garden that's famous for its borders and I've really seen how having a good structure makes those borders sing and I talked to the owner Jeremy Francis about how he created these borders. It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and this is one of a series of videos on beautiful borders so if you don't want to miss them, press subscribe and I'll put the previous videos into the description below along with links to Cloud Hill and the Diggers Club. This was never actually a garden, it was in fact a very famous old nursery and it's in the Dandenongs in southern Australia not far from Melbourne but the climate is very similar to what I experience in my southeast England garden and I recognized quite a few plants that I grow such as Cotinus, Verbena Bonariensis and other plants like that but of course garden structure goes beyond climate and zone and weather because the rules are the same and the advantages are the same wherever you garden. So Jeremy tell how did you start with a hot or cool border? In terms of the garden I suppose we were trying to figure out how to make the most of a certain area that we had in the garden so we started with the structure really and we of course had these two magnificent maples and so they were central to the garden. We had an area on the far side of the maples, a much larger area which we could use for the cooler colours and so we devoted some 20 or something over 20 metres to the double borders for the warm colours and nearly 40 metres for the cooler colours. You enter the garden through the Diggers Club shop, you come into a small enclosed area which was the first part of the garden he designed with a pond and some very interesting contrasting hedging and you then go down some steps to the 20 metres of the hot border and its hot beautiful plantings. You then go up steps at the end of that and through an arch and into a patio or terraced area with a very distinctive urn in the middle and that's like a sort of breather between the hot and the cool borders and then there's another arch and you take steps down and you have a 40 metres cool borders and at the very end another arch drawing you into the garden beyond where it becomes less formal. These elements, the paths, the arches, the steps and the evergreen shrubs with the trees and the hedges behind are really what makes these borders so successful. Another good tip from these borders is that Jeremy planted them along a north-south axis which means that one border gets the morning sun, the other border gets the afternoon and evening sun so they both get approximately the right amount of sun and this means that they both grow to the sun in the same sort of way and you don't get the problem with one border looking fine and the other border reaching out desperate for more sunlight. The beauty of that is you walk along the borders in the middle of summer and everything's, all the flowers are pointing at you. That's brilliant, I wondered how you'd manage that because there is a disadvantage to it though. What's that? Well you never have low light so you never have those lovely backlighting effects. The thing to do is to start with what you've got when you're thinking about structure. Jeremy started from the mature trees that had been in the nursery since the early 20th century, imported from Europe, the United Kingdom and even Japan. There are some magnificent beeches and maples. Mature trees give a garden stature and depth and somehow scale. Of course if you're not lucky enough to have a mature tree or trees in your garden then you'll need to think about planting some trees for the structure. I've got a video on trees for small gardens which I'll put in the description below that might help. The next thing we look at perhaps is hedges. I had a question in the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel the other day where somebody said can you plant a herbaceous border in front of a hedge? Actually it's a brilliant place to plant a herbaceous border because that green background really shows off all the flowers. And the hedges at Cloud Hill are mainly beech and hornbeam. Beech and hornbeam are technically not evergreen, their leaves do die off when winter gets at all cold, but they stay on the plant and then they're pushed off by the foliage that emerges in spring. So actually you've got a sort of permanent coverage and seeing the sunlight come through the hedging can be absolutely lovely. There's a part of the garden here at Cloud Hill I particularly like because they've used fantastic foliage contrast and in a sense foliage contrast, even if some of the plants are deciduous, is actually a very good part of structure for your border. Here he's got box osmanthus and beech hedges all beautifully layered and then in the foreground is this little temple covered in the boston ivy. In the borders as well there's very good foliage contrast with light citrusy green shrubs going next to dark red shrubs and even if the foliage drops off in winter, foliage gives you an amazing amount of structure and colour in a border for months at a time when flowers don't. There are also evergreen shrubs which do a great deal to anchor these borders. When you step into the hot border there are three Chinese plum yews on either side cut very geometrically and they really do anchor the planting. With the hedges, the arch, the steps and the path the whole thing is beautifully layered and textured and the planting just sings out. When you're planning a garden path think about how it fits into the garden structure. I think one of the things that's very successful here is that they've chosen a very similar tone for the paths, for the brickwork on the walls, for the brickwork on the arches and for the pots and it's all a sort of terracotta tone which fits beautifully with both the hot borders and the cool borders. Another theme you could think of could be a stone coloured path considering that we're probably going to be buying things at different times that most of us build our gardens up rather than having everything done all at the same time. It is probably quite a nice idea to have a theme to say I'm either going to be warm brick or I'm going to be like cool stone. Although we think of structure as being permanent structure, pots which are after all temporary are a very good part of giving a garden structure if you don't feel it's got it. Here in the hot and cool borders at Cloud Hill there are a series of terracotta pots planted at intervals. They're actually planted up with structural plants such as evergreens like formiums and in that sense they've become a part of the structure of the border. But before you actually enter the borders there are actually pots also that are planted up with lots of flowers and different colours and also different textures and those are doing something quite different because those are standing in front of plain evergreen hedges. You can use pots in borders in different ways, so they've been used to create more structure in the Cloud Hill borders. When I visited Robbie and Diane Perry's garden they also had pots in their borders which they planted up with flowers in order to fill gaps when flowering was a little bit low, so there's those two ways of using pots in The arches really make wonderful punctuation points in these borders and Jeremy has had them planted up with Virginia creeper or Boston ivy and the thing is about Boston ivy is that it's absolutely wonderful but if you plant it against your house it can just race up and go around the guttering and go over the roof and become very hard to control, but actually planting it up arches like this and also up a pergola that he's got in another part of the garden means that it's much easier to keep under control because you're never actually having to cut it down from very high. You would still need to prune it about two or three possibly even four times a year but of course in autumn it will turn a beautiful colour. So let's have a look at the herbaceous planting here and Jeremy will show us some of the parts of the herbaceous cool and warm borders that are looking particularly good at the moment. This is a Penicetum villosum and a Verona castrum immediately behind and the Verbena veneriensis. And then going on here there's the yellow red hot pokers. Do you know what kind that is? I think that's actually a seedling and below we have the sedimortum joy and actually a really interesting plant which is very annoying. It looks like an Lobularia which is a perennial version of the Elysum but it looks identical except it's a far superior plant. Annoying for nurseries because they have to charge a conventional perennial price for it because it's rather slow to propagate and so something people think they should pay a dollar for they have to pay twenty dollars for and so they why why it looks the same but when you plant it you see why it's just magnificent. And this is a lovely combination this the Verbena veneriensis and what is this one? This is Penicetum orientale tall tails although it's most probably an orientale cross with a hybrid with a tropical. It's a hybrid with a good deal of vigour and picking up good height. This whole business of graduated heights and whether you put everything tall at the back and everything short at the front well up to a point yes but it's nice to have the occasional tall plant at the front and just break it up a little bit. With the Bourne borders of course the cephalotaxis actually achieve that whereas here these borders are much longer and we just use the occasional see-through front at the front really yes and and the taller plants to the rear. Yes so talk me through this grouping here which what the plants are. Well the that's the cephalotaxis the Chinese plumyu the fastidiate form we're using a number of shrubs Rosa moisei that one's geranium and the silver pear this is cricosmia seven sunrise very pretty it's absolutely at its best at the moment person carrier not too sure which one and here at the back is that's a dark leaf dahlia yes that's an that's an interesting one because that's the seedling and and the the rose has kind of collapsed over it but actually that's really interesting seedling so I'm wondering whether we should do something about that one. Dig it up and well maybe put a name on it. Yes that would be good. Now all of these things all the shrubs all the trees are cut back heavily and the surface we almost pollard we just let it grow a tiny bit each year but we keep it much tighter and denser we lose the flowers but we have a much more dramatic foliage effect. I've put together the beautiful borders into a playlist and it covers shape structure color and also tips from wonderful head gardeners so don't miss that and that's at the end of this video and thank you for watching goodbye