Lots, the gardening trend we just can’t get enough of.

 

You’ve all seen it in public gardens and open spaces

that big colourful dramatic wow! of Lots

Like these cowslips in Albert Park, Middlesbrough

Or these Scilla at Kew Gardens, London, in March

Or Camassia at the Royal Horticultural Society garden, Wisley, in May

Bulbs are often used because they’re relatively cheap, quick to plant, and have an almost immediate effect. Especially useful are the spring-flowering ones because by the summer the leaves have died down and you can use the lawn for other things…

like tents-for-events if you are the Scilla lawn at Kew Gardens, and yes it really is the same bit of lawn, but at home you could use for e.g. a deckchair instead.

Lots is, in part, a showbiz tip-of-the-hat for the garden-visitor-who-doesn’t-know-anything-about-plants to admire (because public gardens need to welcome everyone) and part a wish to emulate that look of plants growing in their natural habitat.

Like native bluebells in Wensleydale

Or French Lavender growing wild in Portugal

Or frothy white meadowsweet and dark red bobbles of great burnet in a Tees Valley floodplain meadow

or harebells on the sand dunes at South Gare, at the River Tees estuary

But how do you get Lots into a small garden? Well …

Scatter many thin plants through a small space so they take up more visual attention when flowering, than space in the soil they’re planted in…like these pale purple globes of Allium hollandicum in late May, which almost disappear as seed heads later as the herbaceous plants start to flower.

and a couple of weeks later

Or use a few plants which have many tall flowers which take up Lots of visual space above – here three Stipa gigantea grasses in early July

Or have Lots of plants tucked to one side like this purple honesty in early May

And again as papery-white seed heads in early November

Or on a very much smaller scale, a continuous carpet of creeping thyme, almost in flower in early Juneand here as an effective greeny-grey foliage backdrop in September working as a foil for the other plants in the gravel garden, after the thyme has had its ‘moment in the spotlight’ of flower (that I don’t have a photo of, so you will just have to imagine that one then)

And you can also try getting Lots with the same plant, but in slightly different colours like herbaceous phlox, here in August with pink, mauve, purple and white – a look that would also work with Michaelmas daisies too.

Lots is not as formal as regular repetition of plants along a border

like this cool border at a Community Orchard in the Yorkshire Dales

or as controlled as the big blocks of planting we often see with heathers, like here at the Royal Horticultural Society garden Harlow Carr, in Harrogate

But is a softer way to have a seasonal wow! of your own, no matter what the size of your garden.

Lots of the grass Stipa tenuissima catching the light, early September, in my mum’s tiny garden in the Yorkshire Dales.