A keen gardener’s love of colour and fragrance has resulted in a bold and inspiring display in a small space
Jewel-bright dahlias, colourful nasturtiums scrambling out of pots, roses twining across stone walls, a small potager filled with climbing beans and strawberries and some generously layered borders mean that every centimetre of space is accounted for in Jane Tomlinson and Tim Walls’ garden in rural Derbyshire.
There’s a careful eye and a steady hand behind the abundant planting. Jane has been gardening since she was a child, encouraged by her grandmother, a keen flower grower and arranger, and her mother, who maintained a large garden on the family farm where she grew up. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t passionate about plants,” Jane declares.
For that reason she wasn’t put off by the sparse grounds of the late Victorian cottage she and Tim bought nine years ago. “We loved the location, with views over the surrounding countryside all the way to Ogston Reservoir,” she explains. “The garden was smaller than I’d wanted, but I could see it had potential.”
Looking beyond the weedy lawn and a soft play area that the previous occupants had made for their children, Jane was attracted by the garden’s different levels and the way it wrapped around the house, with the sun rising at the back and setting at the front. “Within a week of moving in. I’d had a greenhouse installed and I brought loads of plants from our previous home,” she says. “I’m the gardener in our family. Tim is extremely supportive and helpful and very good at carrying compost bags, but he leaves the rest to me!”
She planned the garden by eye, first installing a distinctive heart-shaped lawn on the site of the play area. “I’m not sure where the idea came from, but it just fitted perfectly in the space,” Jane says. “A professional gardener helped us with this, laying it on a sandy base. Tim and I then added black plastic edging to keep a crisp outline. I didn’t want to lose the shape over time.”
There was a scrappy top lawn where Jane dug some deep, curvy borders. “With my own cuttings and divisions from our last garden I had no trouble filling the space and everything established well in a surprisingly short time,” she says.
“In fact, we’d only been here for a year when we were approved to open for the National Garden Scheme. Considering the only plants we’d inherited were a plum tree, an apple tree, a hedge and a hydrangea,
I was pleased!”
The garden’s split levels are a feature Jane uses to her advantage. “It meant the bones and the structure were already here. The front of the property is two feet higher than the house, with a low stone wall. It then drops away with a gentle slope to the back of the cottage. Our garden is two feet higher than our neighbours’. Those varying levels mean that when walking through, you do feel you’re among the plants.”
As well as the borders she created, Jane has planted around 60 containers, including a collection of dahlias and another of hostas. “I like the fact you can move pots around so easily, and I try to arrange them in complementary colours,” she says. “Dahlias are a more recent addition. Although I buy a few tubers, many are grown from seed and it’s very exciting because you never quite know what you’re going to get!”
She wards off slugs with a simple homemade remedy. “It’s ‘vampire juice’ or garlic bulbs boiled with water, then cooled, strained and bottled. I dilute a couple of tablespoons in a litre of water and spray it on the plants. You must keep reapplying for it to be effective.” With large-leaved hosta ‘Sum and Substance’ as one of her favourite cottage garden plants, this slug protection in the garden is a must, although another of her top perennials, starry white-flowered Gillenia trifoliata, has good slug resistance. Another plant that Jane is fond of that reliably shrugs off pesky slugs is the summer-blooming astrantia ‘Gill Richardson’, with dark pink flowers on strong stems that don’t need staking.
A small potager yields French beans, strawberries, broad beans and potatoes grown in bags, interspersed with some of her favourite marigolds. And the area has just been expanded. “I try to fit in as much as possible and I’ve recently built five raised beds on the potager and laid bark chipping paths between them so I’ll have a bit more control of the crops and edible flowers next year,” says Jane. Each raised bed is made from one scaffold board cut into four equal lengths with corner posts topped with a post topper seven inches taller. “This gives me a place to tie any covering or netting to, or put my mug of tea on!” A small henhouse is occupied by two Pekin bantams who are allowed out to peck tiny slugs. “I have to watch the hens with the plants, but mostly they’re well behaved,” smiles Jane.
When she can bring herself to stop gathering, Jane enjoys sitting outside the back doors with Tim and their cocker spaniel Daisy, admiring the views over rolling countryside. “It’s sheltered, it’s private and I’m close to my greenhouse,” she says. “Sometimes it’s good to take time to sit down and just enjoy what you’ve grown.”
Open For the National Garden Scheme on Sunday June 28, 10.30am-4pm; ngs.org.uk