Front garden - Ballina
This east-facing front garden had a large L-shaped flower bed, with a mature Prunus laurocerasus hedge and 5 existing deciduous trees (including Malus spp.). The bed is in part-shade and the soil is a fairly heavy clay.
The homeowners wanted to add planting to the flower beds, and to retain the existing trees and hedge which provide screening from the road.
Priorities for the design included:
attracting pollinators and birds;
improving the seasonal interest;
adding a statement tree in a pot next to the house (on a west-facing wall);
adding a range of flowering shrubs, herbaceous perennials and bulbs;
sticking to a simple, clean, pastel colour palette
some evergreen structure.
The planting plan included a mixture of evergreen and decidious shrubs, ferns, grasses and sedges, herbaceous perennials and bulbs. The aim was to create more seasonal interest with flowers (or foliage colour) for most of the months of the year. All plants were sourced from Tully Nurseries.
YEAR-ROUND COLOUR
Early flowers are provided by Helleborus orientalis, Viburnum tinus, and Daphne odora. White daffodils (Narcissus ‘Mount Hood') and a range of tulips (‘Alibi- pink; ‘White Emperor’ - white and ‘Queen of the Night’ - dark purple/black) provide pops of colour in March and April. After this, the Aquilegia, Scabiosa and Viburnum opulus pick up with flowers from May, with some of these flowering for up to 6 months. Frothy flowers appear on the evergreen Heuchera ‘licorice in summer’, along with flowers on the Cornus kousa Geranium and Astrantia in June and July. Late flowers are provided by Anemone x hybrida from August through to early November, by which point there’ll be star-shaped flowers emerging on the Viburnum tinus once again. Viburnum tinus produces blue-black berries in autumn and Cornus kousa has large red fruits in late summer. There’s evergreen structure from the ferns (Dryopteris erythrosa) and sedges (Carex ‘everlime’) as well as some of the shrubs and perennials, and fabulous winter colour in the leaves of the Cornus kousa, Hakonechloa macra, Dryopteris erythrosa and Viburnum opulus.
