Twelve Months of Interest: Building a Garden You Never Tire Of

Two stars a season

The ambition is not a garden that is spectacular all year. That is a public park with a staff. It is a garden where, on any given day, one or two things are worth walking out to see.

Two stars a season is the working target: spring, summer, autumn, winter, two apiece. Everything else is supporting cast — hedges, evergreens, ground cover, repeated grasses. That quiet green framework is what makes the eight look good, the way a plain wall makes a painting.

The gap audit

Here is the field test, and it costs nothing but a year. On the first day of every month, stand at the same two or three viewpoints — the back door, the kitchen window, the seat — and take a photograph. Same spots, same order, twelve times.

Lay the twelve out together at year's end and the holes announce themselves: three photographs identical and grey, or five months of a border doing nothing after its June week. People argue with a memory of a garden. Nobody argues with a photograph.

Then buy against the weak months: visit a nursery when your garden is at its worst and buy what is performing there and then.

What earns its place, season by season

Spring

• Amelanchier lamarckii — April blossom over bronze new leaves, then autumn colour; it earns its place twice
• Magnolia stellata — compact enough for a small garden, and flowers young
• Pulmonaria 'Blue Ensign' and Epimedium x rubrum — early nectar, foliage most of the year
• Narcissus 'Thalia' — naturalised in grass, it returns for good

Summer

• Rosa 'Gertrude Jekyll' — repeat flowering with genuine old-rose scent, which many modern roses lack
• Hydrangea paniculata 'Limelight' — lime to cream, ageing pink, heads standing into winter
• Geranium 'Rozanne' — flowers from June to the first frosts and asks nothing
• Astrantia major and Salvia nemorosa 'Caradonna' — both thrive in cool damp summers
• Philadelphus 'Belle Étoile' — a fortnight of the best scent in the garden

Autumn

• Anemone x hybrida 'Honorine Jobert' — white flowers from August into October, as everything else empties
• Hylotelephium 'Herbstfreude' (long sold as Sedum 'Autumn Joy') — late nectar, then a seedhead all winter
• Miscanthus sinensis 'Kleine Silberspinne' — silver flowerheads catching low light into March
• Malus 'Evereste' — blossom, then crab apples hanging into winter
• Cornus kousa — strong red autumn colour over a good branching shape

Winter

• Betula utilis var. jacquemontii — white bark, best multi-stemmed, luminous on a dull January afternoon
• Prunus serrula — polished mahogany bark worth touching as you pass
• Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire' — orange and red stems, cut hard every second spring
• Sarcococca confusa — glossy and small, and in January it scents a whole courtyard; plant it by a door
• Viburnum x bodnantense 'Dawn' — pink scented flowers on bare wood from November
• Helleborus x hybridus and Galanthus nivalis — the floor of the winter garden
• Phlomis russeliana — seedheads like small candelabra, holding through wind and rain

Succession inside a single border

Twelve months of interest is not achieved by giving each season its own bed, but by layering seasons on top of one another in the same square metres. A hard-working border has four layers sharing the ground:

1. Structure — an evergreen shrub, a clipped yew shape, a grass. Present every day of the year.
2. A shrub with two seasons — amelanchier, hydrangea, cornus. Five months or so.
3. Perennials — three to six months, left standing so the seedheads become the winter display.
4. Bulbs underneath — the same soil, used while the perennials sleep.

The discipline is to leave things standing. Resist the autumn tidy-up: frost on a phlomis seedhead in December is worth more than a bare, neat bed, and the seeds feed birds. Cut it all down in late February, as the bulbs come through.

Bulbs buy months for very little

Bulbs are the cheapest months you will ever buy, occupying idle ground and extending the season at both ends.

• Galanthus nivalis — snowdrops, best moved and planted in the green in late winter
• Crocus tommasinianus — naturalises freely in grass, opening in thin February sun
• Camassia leichtlinii — one of the few bulbs genuinely happy in damp Irish grass
• Allium hollandicum 'Purple Sensation' — drumsticks, then seedheads lasting months
• Nerine bowdenii — pink flowers in October from a warm dry spot at a wall foot
• Cyclamen hederifolium — autumn flowers, then marbled leaves under trees

One honest note on tulips: on heavy wet ground most bedding tulips will not return. Treat them as a one-year display, or plant them 20cm deep in your best-drained spot.