Garden Heatwave Realities & Solutions – Bressingham Conifer Garden Tour

Dried up and depressing!

This year’s heatwave, thanks mostly to a particularly impactful El Niño, has meant gardens have suffered immensely and the effects aren’t just a hotter summer. El Niño effects lasts roughly a year, and act like a giant heat source in the tropics which disrupts global atmospheric circulation, shifting jet streams, storm tracks, and rainfall patterns worldwide. There’s a likelihood of a wetter, colder winter too.

In short, it’s tough for plants. My garden faired pretty well up until the hosepipe ban because I’d got an irrigation system set up on a timer. My parents didn’t, and their garden looked dreadful (see below).

Not what you want to see in the height of the summer is it! There’s some evergreen structure so it could have been worse but it’s not the glorious garden we’d aimed for. Plus, over the last twenty years things have died out and it’s definitely time for a refresh.

Unexpected Request!

Back in the seventies conifer gardens were all the rage. By the time I’d reached my twenties the fashion had well and truly gone and flowering herbaceous plants were all the rage, and for good reason. So I was very surprised when my mother said, “I want conifers again, I’m sick of things not flowering and dying!”

I’ve never designed a conifer garden, I’ve only ever been asked to remove them! So we took a day trip to Norfolk to the Bressingham gardens for inspiration.

To begin with we were a bit disappointed there were so few conifers. My mother kept saying, “I’m sure there was a whole garden around a bungalow filled with conifers.” But because none of us had visited in over forty years we couldn’t remember where it was. Just at the point we were about to head home, I spotted a path we’d not walked down and there was the bungalow and more importantly, the conifers!

There were fewer conifers than the garden originally had but overall it was a nice mix of grasses, herbaceous and conifers. Certainly plenty to inspire us.

Heathers always look great with conifers, they are the bridge between them and flowering herbaceous, they look great with grasses too. Most heathers need an acidic soil to do well, though.

Conifers do still need a reasonable amount of water or they will go brown but they are better equipped, once established, to cope with extremes better than a lot of plants that can be grown in the UK.

I will confess to preferring the areas of the garden where there were fewer conifers like this area below with the flowering Hydrangeas. But that is the job of a garden designer – designing to your client’s tastes and not your own!

I know I’m going to find designing a conifer garden a challenge. Do you know why they can be difficult to design with and especially when blending in with other plants? I will answer that question in a future post, but I’ll be interested to read your answers…

In other news it’s SGD 17th Anniversary so there’s a sale with 50% off some garden design courses, so grab yourself a bargain now!

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