Where do you get your inspiration from? I love to walk through markets, homes, shops, and museums to pick up ideas on different colours and textures that I can translate into planting schemes and bouquets. The other day, I saw a beautiful garnet bouquet from Flower Works, which I loved, and then a wonderful, rich Persian rug with very similar reds and blues in it. It was then that I decided to plant a tapestry garden, and I’ve been hunting high and low for inspiration ever since. I loved the planting at Caversham Court, and want that similar woolly blanket feel, except with the rich colours of the tapestry.

I’ve been thinking of blue sages, red species tulips, grape hyacinths, blue aubretias, anemones, and punctuation marks of golden grasses, all in that same sweeping form that you see in the lovely carpet gardens. For these sorts of gardens, you need to limit yourself to a very small variety of plants and plant them boldly over a wide area.

muscari

The fewer different types of plants planted across a larger area, the better. Plant in bold stripes, don’t intermingle, and buy more plans than you think you’ll need: you’ll still be short by the time they are all planted. Leave space for them to spread, but don’t space them out too much: you want thick, luscious planting, not something that looks like a municipal planting scheme.

I noticed that Flower Works also sell ferns, and I’ll snap up one of those while I’m at it. My carpet garden won’t take shape until the spring, and for the time being I’m trying to focus on keeping my house full of flowers and foliage so that I can at least pretend that I’m in my garden. But no house will ever have a Persian rug that’s as vibrant or luxurious as my tapestry garden that I’ve got planned. Watch this space, and be dazzled by the gorgeous colours.

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