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Required Reading: ‘Grow5: Simple Seasonal Ideas for Small Outdoor Spaces with Just Five Plants’ by Lucy Bellamy
Photography by Jason Ingram.
For some of us, successful plant combinations are rather difficult. Like an inhibited cook, I seek clear and achievable recipes to get past the muddle, and now I have a collection of them, in a book by the former editor of Gardens Illustrated, Lucy Bellamy.
Geranium, rudbeckia, salvia and 2 types of allium
For early summer, a season of blues and purples, Lucy focuses on geranium, rudbeckia, salvia and two types of allium for a self-contained garden.
Inspired by the Piet Oudolf approach in seeing beauty at every stage (fall, winter, spring, summer, and fall again according to the film ), this garden has distinctive seedheads, some of which look very similar to the flower.
The metallic purple flowers of Allium christophii (left) contrast with the glaucous mauve and verdigris of Allium siculum (right).
Famously beautiful at every stage, has flower decorators cutting and storing them for arrangements later (silver spray optional), but they also light up borders through summer and autumn as sculptural spheres, held on stems in various stages of collapse.
Salvia x sylvestris ‘Rose Queen’.
Grass duo Stipa tenuissima and Eragrostis curvula help to highlight the already intense colors of agapanthus and day lily, while campanula brings a less saturated purple hue.
Agapanthus ‘New Blue’ (left) and Campanula lactiflora (right).