Planting around a shady pond

Posted by Amanda on Mar 7, 2011 in Blog, Plants and gardening, Pond renovation, Projects | 0 comments

The lovely people at Palmstead Nurseries in Kent delivered our plants on Friday 4 March 2011 and we were able to get started.  We used all the compost in the compost heap to enrich the soil then got to work setting plants out and planting up. I encourage planting with my clients and today the three of us were able to enrich the soil, set out and plant up in four hours.

The brief was for a contemporary pond in a naturalistic setting so I designed block planting to follow the sweeps and curves of the garden. There’s good evergreen cover with the vivid green leaved fern Asplenium scolopendrium set against dark leaved Ophipogon planiscapus ‘Nigrescens’, then more Ophipogon with yellow variegated Carex hachijoensis ‘Evergold’.  The existing hedging was supplemented by feature evergreens; shiny, palmate leaved Fatsia japonica and rustling leaved bamboo Fargesia ‘Simba’.

Once the planting structure is established I think about flowers; the garden has abundant bluebells and daffodils in spring, so I added graceful Digitalis purpurea, moving on to purple Iris sibirica ‘Ego’ and finishing with luminous white Anemone japonica ‘Honerine Jobert’.

Maintenance is easy too: let the Digitalis self-seed then remove old flower spikes in mid summer (planting new Digitalis plants in the first autumn to get the biennial pattern going), then cut the flowering stems and leaves of the Iris and Anemone down in late November.  With the evergreens, remove tatty leaves as you notice them, and that’s it!

We will add lighting next and get an Iris pseudoacorus, yellow flag iris, for the pond.