They taught us very little about plants except the six best ones to deter

General — July 27, 2010 at 7:37

They taught us very little about plants, except the six best ones to deter vandals – they’re all varieties of berberis.”However, while she was on the course two friends asked her to design their gardens and after she won her diploma the business slowly developed. It is for the most part a seasonal occupation, so in winter she began writing books.Her own two-and-a-half-acre hillside garden, with marvellous views west to the Severn and, on clear days, to the Welsh hills, is based on her unpretentious design principles. No yucca, no statuary; although she does plan to put in a pond. “I’m quite laissez-faire,” she says, as we squelch over the lawn in our green gumboots. “For instance, I like celandine very much and I don’t treat it as a weed. I like cow parsley too: I’ve got a cow parsley walk.”She clearly follows her own top 10 tips (see panel).

Many of the beds are already covered with a thick layer of mulch, part horse manure and part spent mushroom compost. Her plants are arranged in group , and there are plenty of trees.”A lot of my tips are based on my experience here,” she says. “I’ve tried to boil down the mass of information you gather over the years into something fairly accessible. I hope people can begin at Chapter One and end up being competent and confident gardeners. But although it’s practical, I hope that it’s inspirational, too. And it’s concise; bulky books like the Royal Horticultural Society’s encyclopedias can be daunting.”Not that this is pocket-sized: it has 286 quarto pages with charming instructional diagrams by Ian Sideway and informative pictures. One of these shows the clothes carousel, with the all important low-down on where to place it:”Out of sight of your windows, the garden sitting area and, if you are a good neighbour, next door’s as well.

Combine the useful with the beautiful by underplanting a carousel with aromatic herbs which release their scent when trodden on.”A delightful inspiration, which I suspect will never find its way into the RHS Encyclopaedia.! Jane Fearnley-Whittingstall’s `Gardening Made Easy’ is published on Thursday by Weidenfeld and Nicolson at £19.99.. 1 Choose plants to suit your soil and climate; eg, don’t make polythene-lined pockets in chalk gardens so you can grow azaleas. The specific conditions in your garden are what give it its unique character – otherwise all gardens would look the same

2 Be aware how big your plants are going to grow. I go around my garden the whole time digging up huge shrubs that I’ve planted too close together. Give them space – you can always fill in the gaps while you’re waiting for them to grow.
3 However small your garden, plant a tree Of all my plants, the trees give me most pleasure. For a small garden, choose a tree that won’t grow very high and, to stop it taking over, plant it in a large pot or tub.4 Make beds and borders as wide as you can. It’s impossible to get pleasing groupings of different heights and textures if you have a bed that’s only a foot wide.5 Plant in groups – shrubs in groups of three and herbaceous plants in sevens and nines Odd numbers work best.