Gertrude Jekyll on the Blue Garden

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had the ambition to make a blue garden bed. Recently I came across what Gertrude Jekyll has to say about blue gardens. I don't think she was too keen on them to be honest. This is what she had to say in an anthology of her writings "Gertrude Jekyll - The Making of a Garden": "...a blue garden, for beauty's sake, may be hungering for a group of white lilies, or for something of palest lemon yellow, but it is not allowed to have it because it is called the blue garden, and there must be no flowers in it but blue flowers. I can see no sense in this; it seems to me like fetters foolishly imposed. Surely the business of the blue garden is to be beautiful as well as to be blue. ...Moreover, any experienced colourist knows that the blues will be more telling - more purely blue - by the juxtaposition of rightly placed complementary colour."She felt that a garden in shades of blue from true blue to purple, was duller than a garden where blue was contrasted with white or yellow.

I think my blue garden shows my slow realisation of the truth of this. I started off with hydrangeas and euphorbias (the kind with blue grey foliage) and Elijah Fescue blue grass. I wanted to fill up the gaps quickly so I used Sisyrinchium angustafolium "Devon Skies" which unfortunately doesn't spread as the catalogue suggests, just sits miserably in clumps with one or two flowers rather than the "carpet" one is led to expect; Scabiosa which has done very little and certainly not flowered; and lobelia (this at least has been successful and is a brilliant eye catching blue).

As I wrote before the acanthus had to come out and so I planted Delphiniums in the centre and plumbago against the wall, also some Dichroa versicolour which are similar to hydrangeas in appearance.

I also recently bought a small ground cover called "Edna Walling blue bells" which has variegated leaves. It is doing well. However the garden bed now has too many different blues in it, because I couldn't resist buying more plants.

As for contrast - well I had white lilium longiflorum which were lovely but didn't last long. Jekyll liked liliums and they are a significant flower for the Arts and Crafts style garden; Astilbe which is a pale pink and doesn't really work well; and Achillea "Moonlight" which is supposed to be a pale yellow but has not flowered at all yet. I also have some white "Lion's ear" Leonotis Leonurus which is growing well but not flowering yet. Perhaps late summer will bring some contrasting colours if the other flowers last that long. Timing is everything in flower beds it seems.