As a retirement gift to herself, Jenny Tosh, our November speaker, bought herself a new Victorian garden path and redesigned and planted a new front garden.  How she carried that out was the topic of our November AHS meeting – a really interesting talk with beautiful slides – by one of our AHS members and a keen gardener, Jenny regularly opens her garden on the Lakehouse Estate.  She began by describing her love of plants with this saying:-

‘Money can’t buy happiness but it can buy a lot of plants.’ 

As Jenny explained she welcomed the opportunity to design a garden using a blank canvas and explained that, as gardeners, we rarely have that opportunity. She began by asking the questions why what and how.  She decided that her front garden needed re-designing as it included some large trees which obscured views into and out of the garden.  The existing original path was broken in places and needed repairing.  She enlisted friends who are keen gardeners including a garden designer, to help her decide which plants to use and employed the London Front Garden Company to provide the hard landscaping.  New planting beds were created surrounded by York Stone and the colour schemes of the planting were purples, blues and white as well as a lot of shades of green.  She also planted grasses to give some movement to the planting.  Jenny was clear that she wanted planting for year-round interest and slides of the garden as it is now showed some lovely colourful planting.

Jenny also spoke about the challenges of the new garden – showing slides of the snow -covered front garden just after it had been created and explained that during that cold spell she lost some plants.  She talked about which plants worked well and which were disappointing and how some of her favourite plants were susceptible to slug and snail visitors.  All of these ‘drawbacks’ are familiar to all of us gardeners and it was refreshing to hear that other gardeners also have challenges.  Jenny gave us a list of plants and told us where she bought her plants which was really useful – for anyone wanting to redesign or create a new patch of garden or front garden this was a really helpful talk.  Questions and comments at the end of the talk focussed on the importance of front gardens to make the area more beautiful, to encourage more wildlife and to prevent flooding.