Plant some colour into your patio with Andi Clevely | Articles

If your garden is paved with stone or decked with wood that doesn’t mean you can’t be green-fingered. Plants are the perfect way of adding a bit of colour to your patio. Embrace the power of the flower with Andi Clevely, whose book ‘Patios’ will help you get potting trained.

Plants are added to the patio scene in a host of ways, whether as specimen flowers like heat– and sun–loving bougainvilleas and fragrant French lavender (Lavandula stoechas) or as a crowded cottage garden collection of flamboyant perennials and annuals.

One of the less obvious qualities of plants is their ability to settle any built structure into a context of change and natural cycles. A bare patio or courtyard looks much the same at any time of year, whereas plants register the seasons. A patio may be striking but need not be sterile.

Composing small pictures

If you have just built a new patio, take another look at the finished design before choosing any plants and remind yourself of your earlier planting ideas.These may change now that you can appreciate the reality of the area and its impact on the surroundings.

You might want to reconsider those preliminary thoughts, explore new options and revise any draft plant lists to complement the size and style of the patio.

Whether you decide to grow a few specimens as stylish highlights or to green whole areas of the patio with sumptuous plantings, the range of potential plants may be bewildering and the amount of available space impossibly small. Any perceived problem may be turned to advantage, however.

Decide early in the planning stage whether plants are to be grown and staged in containers or as permanent occupants of integrated beds – often the more successful option for large or vigorous subjects.

Adjust your focus

In a limited space every plant needs to work hard to merit inclusion. Instead of planting in colonies and drifts, try choosing distinctive individual plants with special qualities, and get to know them intimately around the seasons. If they become indispensable favourites, keep them, but replace any that disappoint or become commonplace.

Integrate plants vertically

Natural systems like woodlands often comprise three layers or storeys: a top canopy of trees, a middle storey of shrubs and a ground layer of herbaceous plants. This arrangement balances competing needs, shares out resources and maximizes the diversity of plants in a given area.

Identify similarities

Although the apparently artless muddle of a cottage garden has its appeal, it is easier to manage in an open garden than in a small patio space, where organizing plants according to their needs is often more practical.

Grow sun-lovers in the brightest part, and underplant with shade-lovers or grow these in other less sunlit areas. Gather lime-hating plants in a special bed or large container of suitable compost and tender plants where they can be assembled for convenient protection.

Keep in trim

With the exception of structural plants, save space by regularly cutting back top growth and splitting perennials that steadily fatten with age.

Grow more vigorous plants in containers, where root confinement and division or root trimming at repotting time all help to restrict growth. Annual clipping to shape will restrain most shrubs and woody herbs, while some trees and shrubs benefit from regular hard pruning or coppicing.

This is an extract from 'Patios' by Andi Clevely.