85 days to Chelsea… and counting!! Wow, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun! I’m just so busy with my ‘real’ work that it’s hard to allocate time to my Chelsea project at the moment. One should never look a gift horse in the mouth, I know, and I love my work with individual clients, and I enjoy it too. One of my gardens has just been finished in Stoke Newington, and I’m going to help with the planting at the end of this week. This is my favourite stage of a project, when the design on paper comes to life in front of your eyes. You really can’t beat that feeling. I guess it's like a painter standing back for a look at a masterpiece they have created just after they have made the final paint-stroke.
I visited Howards Nursery in Norfolk last week. They are a fabulous wholesale nursery that is providing most of the perennial plants for my Chelsea garden. For those of you who aren’t gardeners, a Perennial is a plant that dies down to an over-wintering rootstock each autumn and grows up again the following spring, (although some are evergreen). I use a lot of evergreen plants and shrubs in my designs because one of the first things that most clients request is a ‘low-maintenance’ garden, with ‘all-year-round interest’. Evergreens provide the structure of the garden and then I ‘colour-in’ with plants that flower at different times of the year. Hopefully my clients will always have something beautiful to look out onto.
Linda Bush is a garden designer based in Kent.
