By Nottinghamshire garden gesigner Alice Bowe. This gently mounded prairie garden was designed as a colourful yet informal compliment to the sweeping gravel drive that which approaches this Oxfordshire Manor.
A collaboration between garden designer and painter Alice Bowe
and Sarah Price, this garden takes the colour wheel as its theme,
rotating through the colours with the seasons. Starting with blue
Ceanothus, the
prairie garden moves through purples to an autumnal red/pink clash
before mellowing to the beiges and browns of dead structure ready
to be christened with frost.
The picture above shows the garden in early summer when the
colour theme is particularly purple. The inky purple stems of
Salvia nemorosa
'Caradonna' lead the eye towards the large globes of the alliums that punctuate a sea of
Salvia tenuifolia. Hints at the red/pink colour scheme that will
follow are found in the form of Gladiolus byzantinus and Aquilegia
'Ruby Port' with the whole planting being lifted by the addition of
the long flowering Geranium 'Kashmir
White'.
By October, the rich autumnal reds of the Sedum 'Autumn Joy' pick up on the
deeper tints of the distant Hydrangea and soft
spires of Persicaria amplexicaulis
'Firetail'. This saturated colour is tempered by the repetition
of spires of Persicaria amplexicaulis 'Rosea' which flowers in a
softer pink. Behind this, the larger grasses of Calamagrostis x
acutifolia 'Overdam' and Calamagrostis brachytricha
provide a golden backdrop that ties back into the now fluffy
seadheads of Stipa tenuifolia at the very front of the planting.
The whole scheme is broken up by the stiff verticals of the bronzed
Allium seedheads
Other gardens by this designer
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