Bare earth, blank mind
The sheet mulch is up, the soil is bare and my mind is blank
The idea of a blank canvas fills me with an odd sense of dread. Yes, there’s hope and the new and the unexplored. But there is also the weight of expectation. I have a couple of hundred square metres of bare earth out there waiting for me to get planting. The pressure is on.
Which is why I’ve decided to start a new trend called Garden Design On a Whim. Essentially, you take a group of plants that you want and organise them by some arbitary measure. I have chosen prickliness. Other people choose the colour white.
The new area to fill the blank canvas is called Prickly Quad. It will have prickly plants in it. Already, I have planted a Crataegus ellwangeriana (scarlet hawthorn) and a Zanthoxylum simulans (Szechuan pepper). So, it is only natural to keep on the prickly tip and plant a Berberis darwinii (Darwin’s barberry), a spikey scattering of Mahonia aquifolium (Oregon grape) and to crown it all, a Ribes uva-crispa (gooseberry) ‘Hinnonmaki Red’. For some strange reason, I ❤️ gooseberries.
But. I have reached the end of the prickly forest garden road. I wanted a Viburnum trilobum (American cranberry) and it isn’t prickly. And my mind is now blank on the prickle front. Time to dip in to another whimsical theme… 🙂