The gravel garden: a different way to garden

The Gravel Garden: A Different Way to Garden

Now I'm going to introduce a totally different way to use plants grown from seed – and encourage plants to grow themselves from seed – for a dynamic and rewarding garden that stands up to drought.

My front garden is a relaxed cottage garden style with lots of colour, interest and different flower types. It's full of life and interest.

It was a huge expanse of gravel with a laurel hedge around it. I cut square beds and edged them with brick. I planted the beds up with plants I'd brought with me and starting growing plants from seed for this garden. I've chosen plants that self-seed and colonise the gravel.

Key Plants from Seed

Some of the plants I've grown from seed that have been most successful in here are perennials, including:

• Dianthus carthusianorum – dotty pink flowers on tall wiry stems. Very easy to grow from seed and flowers in the first year, now self-seeding around
• Centranthus ruber 'Albus' – again very easy to grow from seed and has been spreading, might need to edit some out from time to time
• Cenolophium denudatum – a really tough plant that germinates easily and will also self-seed, lovely white umbels, a bit shorter and more compact than Ammi majus and also perennial
• Digitalis grandiflora – one of my favourites, a perennial foxglove. Can plant in full sun, very easy to grow from seed, comes back year after year and slowly self-seeds around
• Digitalis parviflora – another perennial foxglove with really unusual rusty brown spires, also self-seeding
• Lychnis chalcedonica 'Carnea' – a perennial with rounded umbels of beautiful salmon-pink flowers in a mixture of shades. A really good plant and very easy to grow from seed. This clumps up so I've been dividing and moving pieces around
• Division is another way to save a lot of money by making new plants for free. If you can't fit them into your garden, you can give to friends or sell in charity plant sales.

Self-Seeding Annuals

Certain plants love growing in gravel, so having planted into the beds, the plants are now self-seeding around to give a naturalistic look. What's nice with self-seeders is the garden starts designing itself and you never know what it's going to be like from year to year.

Over time you'll get a feel for which plants are self-seeding and learn what the seedlings look like so you don't immediately weed them out. I let the annuals seed around and then it's simply a question of editing to prevent anything taking over. It's a very different way of gardening from a herbaceous border.

• Ammi majus – I leave the seedheads standing over winter because even if they start to look a bit messy in autumn if there is a frost those seedheads look fantastic.
• Papaver somniferum (opium poppies) – these come back year after year after seeding.
• Nigella (love-in-a-mist) – I scattered seed here the first season and it's now spread throughout. Nigella couldn't be easier to grow from seed – if I want it somewhere else I just pick some seedheads and shake them out elsewhere.
• Leonurus sibiricus – a perennial that I've grown for the first time this year. It has tall spires that I expect will self-seed.

With really easy direct-sow annuals like poppies and nigella, my approach is just to scatter the seed where I want it, either by picking some seedheads when they ripen and shaking them out where I want plants, or collecting the seed and scattering it in late March to mid-April.

• Don't forget where you've sown them – mark the area with some gravel or sticks so you avoid weeding the seedlings out by accident or mulching over the top without realising.

Gardening Without a Plan

For the back garden, I did a complex planting plan for the back border, but I didn't use a planting plan here. I did it all by eye.

1. I cut out the beds and added some year-round structure with evergreen shrubs such as Teucrium fruiticans, Hebe salicifolia, Hebe rakaiensis and box balls (Buxus sempervirens).
2. After putting those in quite randomly I started thinking about the rest of the flowers. I put in the plants I'd brought with me such as Alchemilla mollis and geraniums, placing those as if painting with them.
3. I then started growing things like the Ammi and the Dianthus from seed to start building up the picture.

Within this tapestry, I've got a lot of different textures and colours that weren't necessarily planned, but weave in and work together:

• feathery Stipa tenuissima – feathery perennial grass that's very easy to grow from seed and will self-seed
• lots of Alchemilla mollis that was originally grown from seed and is also now self-seeding, which gives a lime-green colour that dots around and is echoed by Euphorbia oblongata
• Euphorbia oblongata is a great euphorbia for cutting and is really easy to grow from seed.

Choosing the Right Plants for This Position

An advantage of this type of gardening is that it needs less water because I've chosen plants that are quite drought-tolerant. These are all plants that thrive in quite a hot, sunny, west-facing situation and in the dryness of the gravel.

Staying on Top of the Seedlings

When growing in gravel, plants seed readily into it, so you just have to keep an eye on things and edit where necessary. For example, Stipa tenuissima self-seeds around quite a lot, so I just have to pull it out where I don't want it.

Benefits of This Type of Gardening

As well as not needing much water, there are also other benefits to a gravel garden.

• You also don't need much space to have a gravel garden and could make one on a small scale.
• It's a really rewarding type of gardening to do because you're encouraging different plants to intermingle.
• It's also quite forgiving – there are a few weeds but you can't really see them. As long as you're not letting them take over it's absolutely fine.
• A lot of successful gardens in this style, for example at Beth Chatto's Gardens in Essex and the Knepp Estate in Kent, have been created using gravel or crushing rubble or concrete that was already in place. If the materials are already there, it's a really sustainable option.

You're sowing seeds to start off with and then letting them do their own thing with the occasional intervention and edit, so it's a really easy way to garden and one I think is very rewarding. I'd really encourage you to give it a go.