Surrey Homes | SH61 | November 2019 | Gift supplement inside

Garden
“The house at Great Dixter
often has a glorious display
of cuddly conifers nestling by
the porch in the autumn.”
‘Golfball’ and bigger evergreens like Choisya ternata; but
beware of cramming in too many blobby round shapes; just
as too many cooks can spoil a pudding, too many puddings
stuff up a border (or something along those lines).
Viburnum davidii is a mid-border stalwart for a semishaded
position, demurely handsome and saved from
‘puddingdom’ by its dark green, lance-shaped leaves.
Mahonia is a striking evergreen with aggressive looking
serrated foliage and spectacular, highly scented flowers
that bloom in winter, like a spiky burst of sunshine.
Conifers have been much maligned, but are creeping back
into fashion – and, despite what we hear, not all of them
want to grow to be a hundred foot tall. There are all sorts of
different shapes available that can provide interesting contrasts
in texture and in foliage colour. Grow them in a border, or
in containers – the house at Great Dixter often has a glorious
display of cuddly conifers nestling by the porch in the autumn.
‘Treelets’ and sub-shrubs
A tree is generally considered to be a woody plant with a
single stem, whereas a shrub has several and the leafy canopy
is nearer the ground. We lump woody plants into categories,
but some refuse to conform and teeter on the edges of
the divides. At the boundary of trees and shrubs are what
I think of as ‘treelets’, which often are arrived at through
pruning – or the lack of. Some shrubs, if left unpruned, get
delusions of grandeur and head for the skies, determined to
become lofty trees. Many trees – silver birch, Amelanchier
and Prunus serrula, for instance, are carefully pruned when
young to have several stems, which shows off their lovely
bark and keeps them a little lower than a single stemmed
tree. Trees are adaptable to pruning – most hedge plants
Opposite page: Conifers in containers at Great Dixter
This page top: Cornus sanguinea ‘Midwinter Fire’
Middle: Pittosporum Bottom: Sambucus nigra
129 surrey-homes.co.uk