A year ago, together with a band of like-minded helpers, we built a great big show garden at the RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival. Perhaps ‘built’ is the wrong verb, ‘plant’ is what we did. The garden was all about the plants. It was meant to illustrate the ethos of choosing plants that are going to thrive in the situation you have.
Gardens are not the same as nature, but studying nature, learning lessons from what grows where and in what conditions, illuminates the way forward for us gardeners. To that end, the garden was divided into different areas, each one a reference to a specific habitat that would inform plant choices in a garden situation.
In real life the chances of having six different habitat types in one garden are pretty remote, but this was a show
