London gardens

You can’t beat a maritime climate for luscious growth.   I have taken my camera with me on my walks about town this week and thought I should share the fruits of my travels.

Boy have the Regent’s Park gardeners done well this year.   Their long borders can be a bit hit and miss.   But this year it’s definitely put on the sun glasses and gawp at the display.

When you start at the southern end the colours are electric mix of yellows, reds and greens. I especially liked some of the combinations: achillea gold with the red of crocosmia lucifer: something I could actually do in our garden.

But the majority of the display looks as though they have been lavishly mulched, watered, tended and coddled. That’s never going to happen in the harsher conditions (and less staff) of the Ardeche garden.

But I can still gaze and ooh and ahh and dream.

As you walk up the borders (and they are hundreds of metres long) the colours change to the blue end of the spectrum where things are cooler and less exhausting.   I can’t decide which I prefer.   Years ago I would have scoffed at the vibrant colours and made a a teeter for the blues.   But I have come to admire the brights.   Who would have thought that orange flowers would be my preferred colour?  But they go so well with the greens, and if they are in proportion, a very pleasing effect.

But enough of my own garden here are some more pictures.

These were taken on my usual route through my part of town to the shops.   Knightsbridge is awfully conservative and refined: box is adventurous here.

But even though most places are utterly understated, you do get the occassional shock of colour and vividness. These window boxes always make me smile.

But hedges are on my mind at the moment; I’m plotting a beech hedge for the potager this autumn, so I always look at this one house and marvel at the control and height of the hedge. It’s tall and skinny and never has a leaf out of place.

But to finish: back to achillea terracotta. Public planting at its most sumptuous.   This plant is definitely on my wish list. I would have have considered using it as a mass planting like this, but you have to admire it’s verve.   It’s planted up on a little roundabout with helenium moorheim beauty and underplanted with marigolds of all things.