Garden designing from scratch: Bits and pieces - our garden, Chelsea and Hampton Court

I have emerged from project madness - this one was a primary school garden in Wimbledon and it has consumed my life for the last couple of weeks. We had to present our work at the school where it was judged by hundreds of 5-11 year olds! They don't hold back, that's for sure. Anyway, now I'm done and giving myself the morning off, I thought I would just put a few bits and pieces here that I've been meaning to add for a while.

Top - tumbling toms, middle - courgettes,
bottom - strawberries

First, I thought you might like to see the progress of the Ladder Allotment in our garden which I love! Everything is growing like mad and, so far, the slugs and snails don't seem to have figured out how to get in. I couldn't resist putting one of these in my school garden proposal.

Cosmos

A lovely surprise has been the Cosmos given to us my Jon's parents. We didn't have a clue what colour they were going to be and I was slightly worried about more pink. But, they are all a beautiful deep magenta colour and they look great - Cosmos has lovely fine foliage and flower like mad - they make great cut flowers. In our garden they are adding some really useful vertical colour as we're a bit lacking in later flowering tall perennials. A great Cosmos that we don't have is the alluringly named Chocolate Cosmos (Cosmos atrosanguineus) which have chocolately brown flowers. I'd buy the variety 'Chocamocha' just for the name!

Philippa and our handywork -
I think a bit survived unchanged!

The RHS Chelsea Flower Show was a few weeks ago now and seems long gone. But I'm fortunate to have a few plants from show in our garden, admittedly looking a little more modest there than they did there. I got the chance to help Ann-Marie Powell build the British Heart Foundation Garden which she designed to support the charity's Mending Broken Hearts appeal. It was a great experience to be there in the build-up to see the incredible amount of construction and manpower that goes into creating the show gardens. Here is my classmate Philippa stuffing some hostas, grasses (lots of bright green Hakonechloa) and ferns (you can see to the left of the picture my favourite, the red-tinged Dryopteris erythrosora) between the giant red steps in Ann-Marie's garden - we like to think that we played a small part in how the garden finally looked!!

Here you can see a video tour of the finished garden on the BBC's Chelsea Flower Show website. It really was a striking garden with lush planting and a strong message.

I can't resist including a picture of Cleve West's garden
this planting was so inspiring

On the final day of Chelsea, there is a sell-off of plants by many gardens and stands. I was there that day because I was helping out again, this time on The Daily Telegraph Garden designd by Cleve West which won Best in Show (here's the video tour). Working in show week involves handing out information to the public, answering questions etc. You can imagine how popular this garden was because it had won the ultimate prize and was stunning. It was a lot of fun to do it and I am very glad I swotted up on the plants beforehand because it made it lot more rewarding when people asked searching questions!

Bright red spores on
the underside of D.erythrosa
foliage

Anyway, I made sure I headed over to the British Heart Foundation garden at the end of the day to get some souvenirs. I could barely carry them all on the bus but it was worth it. So here we have one of the two Dryopteris erythrosa I grabbed sitting next to an Alchemilla mollis which I also popped in my bag for good measure (with a bit of added water to show how beautiful the droplets are on the leaves).

Fern and froth: Dryopteris
erythrosora and Alchemilla mollis

Vietnamese coriander

And just one more Chelsea souvenir plant (there were a couple of others stuffed in my bags too...) This is Vietnamese coriander or Rau Ram (Persicaria odorata) which can be used in cooking but just looks great with its maroon V-shaped marks on the leaves. It's a frost tender perennial herb and looked great planted at the front of the British Heart Foundation garden set against the bright red metal structure.

I thought I would add a couple of pictures of the garden our class is tending to at Hampton Court Palace. It is tucked away, off the main visitor route, and is in what was the Apprentices' Garden. We are growing a fairly random selection of fruit, vegetables and plants, and most of what we've planted has been propogated at home by the class. It's a bit tricky finding the time to get down to the garden to work on it but it is actually looking pretty good, not least because it is given some regular TLC by one of our tutors, Amanda.

So I'm going to leave it there and go and do some work! It's less than 3 weeks until the end of term and exams loom. Hampton Court Flower show is on 5th-11th July and I'll be helping out there too. Should be fun. Then 2 months 'off'... more on what I'll be doing in the holidays later.