Openscape Ltd — Show Garden, Cookham
Greenwood Plants creates a show garden that looks established from opening day
Overview
Greenwood supplied the planting for a show garden at Astoria Park, a Bellway Homes development in Cookham, Berkshire, installed by Openscape. A show garden has a job to do from the day the sales office opens, which is to let visitors picture themselves living there. That puts a particular demand on the planting, since nothing can be left to fill out over a season or two.
Client – Openscape Ltd
Project – Astoria Park Show Garden (Bellway Homes)
Location – Cookham, Berkshire
The Brief
The garden needed to look established on opening day and to hold that appearance through the whole selling period, including the winter months when a good share of the viewings happen. The scheme was built on structure and year-round foliage rather than on flowering, with enough colour to photograph well and enough maturity to make the space feel settled.
Our Approach
Structure came first. A run of Olea europaea spirals at two metres and Taxus baccata cones at just over one and a half metres lines the timber pergola walk, giving the garden height and rhythm on day one. Clipped balls of Taxus baccata, Osmanthus × burkwoodii and Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Gold Ball’ sit lower in the same beds, repeating the shapes at ground level.
Colour comes from foliage rather than flower. Cordyline australis ‘Pink Passion’ and ‘Red Star’ stand against the pale gravel as the strongest note in the garden, with Phormium ‘Apricot Queen’ for upright contrast. Four cultivars of Nandina domestica carry the borders through the year, ‘Firepower’ and ‘Obsessed’ for red and orange, ‘Blush Pink’ for its new growth, and ‘Magical Lemon and Lime’ for lighter tones. Loropetalum chinense ‘Fire Dance’, Leucothoe ‘Zeblid’ and Berberis thunbergii ‘Tiny Gold’ fill in around them, while Coprosma ‘Pacific Dawn’ and Griselinia littoralis ‘Variegata’ add variegation close to the paths.
Where the beds meet the house, Trachelospermum jasminoides was supplied already trained on trellis at nearly two metres, so the brickwork was softened immediately rather than in three years’ time. Prunus lusitanica and Photinia × fraseri ‘Red Robin’ at over a metre were used for screening along the boundaries, and Pittosporum tenuifolium ‘Tom Thumb’ and Ligustrum sinense ‘Sunshine’ were supplied in two container sizes each so the planting could be graded rather than sitting at a single level.
A small group of perennials provides flower where it is seen most, around the seating. Kniphofia ‘Red Hot Popsicle’, Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’, Geum chiloense ‘Lady Stratheden’, Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, Potentilla fruticosa ‘Goldfinger’ and mixed Dahlia were all chosen to arrive in flower rather than to come good later.
The Result
The garden opened complete. The pergola walk reads as an avenue rather than a row of young plants, the borders are full to their edges, and the weight of evergreen structure means the garden will look much the same to a buyer visiting in February as it does now. For Openscape, who count show homes among their specialisms, the planting had to arrive at the right size and in the right condition on the day, and it did.
