A Moment in Time
The days are shorter … the mornings are crisp and misty … the summer is sadly over. However, I must admit that autumn is my favourite gardening season - there is something wonderful and warming about autumnal colour hues. They have had time to blend, evolve and mature, giving gardens a sense of harmony. There are still occasional bright and vivid moments, but they don’t clash or compete. They are part of the same story. Done well, they complement the whole.
I’m used to seeing these colour combinations play out at Kew in West London, especially in the very long borders running each side of the Broad Walk, where great drifts of colourful plants can now be seen. But these do not really reflect what most of us can do in our own gardens where space is much more limited.
And this is also true for the designers of the Chelsea Flower Show, moved to September this year from May, so I was really looking forward to seeing the way their designs reflected this change of season. As Chelsea is about ‘show gardens’ the designers have had to adjust their planting schemes to achieve optimal autumnal displays and I must say, they were all very successful. For me, they created the best Chelsea I can remember.
However, this does make me think about the purpose of these gardens. If the designers had simply stuck to their original late-spring planting plan, what would these gardens have looked like now – in autumn. What is wrong with including Eryngiums that have passed their best and started to turn brown. That is what mine have done in the pot beside my door and they look good beside the colourful salvia and echinacea flowers. Perhaps the judges would not consider this a reason for deducting marks, provided the designers stated in their design proposals that their plants would appear realistically. This would take a brave gardener too!
So why aren’t the show gardens more representative of the gardens we all have? This is not a question normally asked. Should Chelsea gardens actually be ‘year-round’ gardens or should they continue to be gardens designed for a ‘moment-in-time’? As the main theme this year was the very real environmental crisis, maybe this is a question that should be discussed. After all, most of us do not dig up and replant our beds several times a year. We plant once and then we enjoy what the plants do and when they do it. We generally don’t or can’t simply swap out our spring colour mixture for plants optimising autumnal colours. Maybe this point emphasises the slightly contrived nature of Chelsea gardens. They are not planted for year-round performance.
That said, some of the autumnal colour combinations were superb and the gardens certainly show-cased numerous beautiful plants. But this really brought home the importance of SeeHow for me. While SeeHow is designed to help gardeners make those individual plant choices, based on desired colour and growth habit, it also functions to show us how our plants work together in our gardens throughout the whole calendar year. For most of us, our gardens are not ‘moments-in-time’.
Teasels at Kew Gardens - perhaps at their most beautiful …
The above Text and all Photographs are copyright of Wincenty (Wicek) Sosna. Please contact SeeHow for permission to reproduce in any way, in part or as the complete text.