Modern buildings and roads tend to create stark boundaries: all structure with no life
Well-thought-out planting will soften these hard lines and corners, and bring them alive, like adding a great painting to an empty frame. In general, you want to employ a lot of evergreen shrubs and climbers that cover things up all year-round.
Framing a Pathway
Top of the list for lining a sunny path is Lavender (‘Hidcote‘ is Britain’s favourite variety), which only needs trimming twice a year to maintain its beautifully plump curves of silvery-green foliage.
It doesn’t matter if your neighbour also has lavender running down their path: it looks great, is fantastically scented, and bees love it, so it deserves to be popular!
Boxwood is a foliage-only plant, and for topiary there are few that can match it for clipping beautifully. Unlike Lavender, it will thrive in the shade:
Hostas also spill over nicely for a more informal look, and provide a lush “under-background” for contrasting flowers right above them, in this case Allium Purple Sensation:
The Patio
Patios generally have walls or fences to cover, you want flowers around head height, and fragrance is a big plus, so climbing plants are a great choice wherever you can provide support for them.
Climbing roses provide a permanent framework of canes that only look a bit sad in mid-winter, when you aren’t out on your patio so much anyway, and by mixing a climber with a rambler you can have the best of both worlds: the climber’s great long flowering period, and the rambler’s explosive display followed by lots of rose hips in winter.
By mixing climbers together, you massively increase the interest provided by your walls: our ready-made climber mix contains an ivy for evergreen foliage, a honeysuckle for aroma, and a clematis for a second season of wonderful flowers.
Roses trained on walls or fences can be inter-grown with a light clematis that won’t cast too much shade on it: clematis are generally more vigorous than roses, so it’s often best to either plant the clematis a year or two after the rose, or else start the clematis off on a wigwam of bamboo canes while the rose establishes on the wall supports, then train the clematis onto the wall later.
In ideal conditions with good soil and sun, one climbing rose can have up to three clematis vines on it, so you could extend the flowering season to the limits of winter at both ends, but this is not a project for the low maintenance gardener as you will need to sort through which clematis vines to prune when.
To make life easy when combining roses and clematis, simply choose clematis in Pruning Group 3, which are hard pruned down to the base every year. That does exclude all the early-flowering clematis varieties, but it will make managing the arrangement so much simpler!
Doorways
Roses can be trained onto a “tree stem”, into a lollipop form known as a standard. In larger gardens, these roses have a wider range of design possibilities, but in most normal urban gardens they are to be found in one of two places: towards the back of the flower bed, or on either side of a doorway, where they are about as popular as bay trees. Hey, if something works, there is no need to fix it!
