Twenty-plus years of the Bold and Brilliant Garden

The purpose of this blog is to share my discoveries of recent varieties of plants which help provide a "Bold and Brilliant Garden".  I thought one way of doing this would be to list my five top favourite plants.  Only one of them is mentioned in Sarah Raven's great book The Bold and Brilliant Garden .  The rest have emerged onto the market since the book was published in 1999.  What these plants have in common for me, apart from their all-round excellence, is that I have several of each of them, despite the smallness of my garden.  1. ROSA 'WARM WELCOME' This is a climbing rose which is recommended in Sarah Raven's book.  It has not been improved upon! It has small orange flowers.  These are beautiful single flowers in a clear, definite orange.  They are lightly scented: I can detect the scent when the plants are flowering well. And they DO flower well, for ages.   There are some flowers on the plants most of the time.  They are a joy in...

Having a decent autumn garden is a matter of choice.  You simply choose plants which make your garden look great in the autumn months.  It took me a long time to realise this as a gardener.  Occasionally as a thought-experiment I consider how one could have an exclusively autumn garden, where the garden looks indifferent in summer but amazing in autumn.  In practical terms that isn't necessary: a garden can look great in both seasons. Writing this piece in mid-September, my garden is reminding me of three ways to extend the season of the Bold and Brilliant garden into autumn. 1. GROW LONG-FLOWERING PLANTS Pelargoniums, heleniums, alstroemeria, roses, begonias, may all look good coming into the autumn.  It depends on the variety.  The task of the gardener is to select and plant the choice varieties which will put on a colourful show over a very long period. My garden on 15 Sept - still colourful 2. GROW PLANTS WHICH FLOWER IN AUTUMN Asters (Michaelmas daisi...

This is a success story. Begonias do not loom large in Sarah Raven's The Bold and Brilliant Garden and it is easy to imagine why.  In the last century they had a bad reputation.  They were exactly the sort of insubstantial regulation-municipal-garden plants which one wanted to avoid: small, with small flowers and unenticing foliage. In recent years they've improved no end.  The great step forward was when Begonia 'Glowing Embers' came on the market.  It is a terrific looking plant with stunning orange flowers and interesting dark foliage.  Many other lovely varieties came in its wake. Begonias have a host of advantages.  They flower for ages from summer to late autumn.  They are often happy in shade as well as in sun.  They can survive a certain amount of neglect.  Some survive winter and come back for years on end.  Above all they are great for the Bold and Brilliant Garden as they can come in wonderful shades of orange, red, yellow ...

In the bold and brilliant garden, clashes of colour don't really happen. All the bold and brilliant colours tend to go well with each other. Discretion is required though in how large to make your clumps of colour. You want to avoid a mimsy-pimsy, traditional-municipal-garden arrangement of having lots of little plants each in a different bold colour.  Instead you want to promote solid blocks of colour.   In the picture below I have a decent-sized clump of Alstroemeria 'Indian Summer' giving me the hot colours of orange/red/yellow, and below it a contrasting solid line of five bright pink pelargoniums (survivors, pleasingly, from the previous year).  This combination looks great. and will continue to look great into the late autumn.  The surrounding plants tend to echo the arrangement - for instance the foliage plant to the right of the alstroe is Eucomis Comosa 'Sparkling Burgundy' which underlines the alstroe's dark foliage, whereas the yellow evergreen shrub...

In principle, red-hot pokers, properly known as kniphofia, would be my favourite flowering plant.  They make me smile just looking at them.  And they come in the bold and brilliant colours: orange, yellow, red. I like to present you with a success story.  Here I can't, or at least not entirely.  The variety I want hasn't been bred yet.  All I have is one that has pleased me to a reasonable extent. For me, the problem with kniphofia is that they do not flower for long enough.  A good alstroemeria will give months of flower but a good kniphofia will give you only a few weeks.  I love pokers so much that I would like them to be around for a far longer period.   So there is still a job for the plant breeders to do.  Early on, I went poker-mad.  I purchased three orange pokers: Kniphofia uvaria "Nobilis", Kniphofia "Fiery Fred" and Kniphofia rooperi.  Each had their merits.   "Nobilis" is very tall and impressive.  I ...

This is about my helenium journey. Everything has to be a journey nowadays, it's the fashion. One has to have a weight-loss journey, a mental-health journey - you name it, there has to be a journey for it.  I'd normally be a bit old for such modish metaphors, but finding the right plant for the Bold and Brilliant Garden involves a bit of a journey too - often a journey to the wheelie bin to dump your inferior varieties!  Heleniums are perennial daisies with much to recommend them. The best varieties flower for a long time from June onwards in lovely shades of browny-red, or browny-orange, or yellow. The flowers are neat and plentiful. They do need a little more care than other types of daisy - good watering, dead-heading - but they are worth it.        My helenium journey started with Helenium "Moerheim Beauty" because it was recommended by Sarah Raven in T he Bold and Brilliant Garden as well as by other people.   It is a reddy-brown shuttlecock ...

Nothing explains better the reason for this blog than my experience with alstroemeria.   I have called this piece "A tale of two alstroemeria" but it would be more accurate to call it a tale of two LOTS of alstroemeria, the ones I bought originally and the ones I bought more recently.  I cannot remember why I was drawn to alstroemerias (alstroes for short) but they are wonderful. They are prime providers of the orange, yellow and red hues needed for boldness and brilliance. I have grown them for almost two decades, but I rarely see them in other people's gardens. They deserve to be grown more widely.  The primary purpose of this blog is to explore the improvements in varieties of plants since Sarah Raven published The Bold and Brilliant Garden in 1999. When I first bought alstroemeria not only did I go for the bold and brillant hues but I also sought to get the best varieties in terms of flowering impact and length of flowering season.  Help was at hand. T...

At the turn of the century I bought a house in South East London with a smallish garden. Originally I was vaguely planning to turn it into a cottage garden, all hollyhocks, lupins and roses. Then one day I went into a bookshop and found a new book by an unknown author called Sarah Raven. The book was The Bold and Brilliant Garden  and it transformed my ideas - and my garden. I am immensely grateful to the now-famous Sarah for her inspiration and guidance as well as to other great gardeners like the late Christopher Lloyd (famed for tearing up his rose garden in order to create an Exotic Garden) and the great plantsman Bob Brown.  I have also benefitted from two decades of reading the excellent Which Gardening , whose plant trials and New Plants reviews have helped me make many a sound purchase. Why this blog? Its purpose is chiefly an updating one. The Bold and Brilliant Garden was published in 1999. I am amazed at the new varieties of flower which have come into co...