Planting Combination #6

Benton irises and cottage garden flowers in the Bannerman's Somerset garden

Julian Bannerman among his cottage garden plants including scented stocks Matthiola incana ‘Pillow Talk’, Paeonia lactiflora ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, masses of nigella and sweet Williams, Lupins ‘My Castle’ and ‘Masterpiece’ and Benton irises.

The more I look at different gardens, the more I realise how much I prefer a planting aesthetic that feels like it hasn’t been designed. Those neat-and-tidy, unimaginative schemes with a perfectly symmetrical balance of nepeta, alliums and alchemilla and perhaps an Annabelle hydrangea and not much else, leave me slightly cold. I want something that looks like it might have happened naturally, something that is delightfully haphazard and full of character.

The Bannermans are absolute masters of this style of planting. In her book Husbandry, Isabel Bannerman writes: ‘Sometimes what is needed is not more garden, but less – less mowing, less planting, less art, less artifice. There is nothing more pleasing than an orchard, grass and trees; perhaps add to that lilac, philadelphus, some species of rose, some ‘non-planting’ and, near the house, some pinks and some scented cottage-garden plants.’ And this is exactly what they have done in their own garden at Ashington Manor in Somerset.

The most concentrated planting appears in a pair of borders that frames the entrance to their garden studio and the yew avenue that lies at the back of the house. I first saw and photographed these borders several years ago when I visited with Andrew Montgomery to capture the garden for our book Pastoral Gardens. At the time the borders were quite new but already looking spectacular and I was completely bowled over by the generosity and abundance of the planting, the fabulous colours and the scent that drew you round the garden by your nose.

Despite the unpretentious appearance of these borders, there is an art to throwing plants together like this, and it is usually predicated on a deep-seated, intimate knowledge of plants. The Bannermans know exactly the sort of plants they like and they know how those plants are going to behave - so however they combine them, they are going to look good together. They can almost throw them all up in the air and plant them where they land, so to speak. I told the story of the garden in the book but didn’t drill down into the detail of these borders, so here is a closer look at the Bannermans’ planting magic.