I'm at Packwood House in Warwickshire described by one Edwardian visitor as a house to dream of,
and a garden to dream in. One of the most striking features of the garden are the magnificent borders.
Full of colour and interest for many months of the year and I'm here to meet
Senior Gardener Robyn Booth who'll tell us a little more about how they're maintained.
Hi Robyn. I really like these borders. They're like a really nice mixture of sort of quite
architectural and structural, but also loose and colourful. What's the thinking behind the design?
Yeah they're really beautiful, they're romantic aren't they. And they have a really lovely
structure to them but they're also really romantic and soft as well. Obviously they're really long
aren't they and most people couldn't really do borders this length, certainly not double borders this length.
But are there elements that you could recreate at home? Yeah. We use what's called
a matrix style of planting. So that's where you're repeating the plants that you use but not
in a way that's monotonous. So you could easily take a section of the planting that we've got here.
For example you could use a structural plant like a grass or a yucca and then build a palette
of plants around it. So things that will fill in the front like your hardy geraniums or salvias.
And as long as you're thinking about the colour palette and keeping that quite simple,
that could work easily in a smaller space. Right, and now in autumn it's a really good time to do
lots of maintenance to the border. So is is that your job? It is one of my many jobs.
It's a great time of year to do all sorts of things. Whether it's mulching to improve the drainage
and the structure of the soil. Cutting back as well to allow new growth to come through in the spring.
And also division when things have outgrown their space.
Okay so I think that's what you're going to do right now?
That's right, that's it. So this is pulmonaria diana clare which has got this
lovely silvery texture. So it's outgrowing its space as you might be able to see here.
There's different ways you can divide. One of the simplest ways is what I'm going to do now
which is I'm just going to dig it out, lift it, and then split it, chop it into
sections with my spade. So it'll look a bit brutal but it will do the job. Okay.
So you've got nice soil there. Yeah it's beautiful soil. Wow and yeah I can see it's coming out. A huge big chunk.
So when you're dividing something it's really good to try and look for
sections of smaller plants that you can use. And as long as you've got a good root attachment as well
that will help it establish much quicker. So the roots here look really healthy.
Yeah it's really established so it should be fairly easy to chop up into sections.
And you're going be slicing through some of the crown there but it doesn't matter?
No not at all. Pulmonaria is a really robust plant, herbaceous perennial. So it will die
down over the winter anyway, and this will just help rejuvenate it and keep it in its space.
So how much of this do you think you're going to end up putting back in the border?
I'll probably only do a small section, maybe about that sort of size to fit it in.
Let's just pop you back in.
And I want to sort of plant it about the same depth it was in before.
And you're just firming it in with your hands? That's it. So I'm just back-filling the soil,
pressing it down so there's not any air pockets. The roots are making contact with the soil.
Excellent, almost looks like you haven't been here. That's the dream.
What are we going to do with all this? This is what we're going to take back to the nursery with us
and we're going to pot it up, and I'll show you our greenhouses. Excellent. Let's do it. Okay.
So you're just going to pop them up into individual pots? Yeah that's right so I just
want to make sure that I've got a nice bit of root on to the division that I'm using. And I'm using a
peat-free compost with a little bit of slow release food and some grit as well for a bit of drainage.
And I'm just going to pop it into a one metre pot. And it's similar to like when you're
back-filling in the garden really. You want to make sure you're firming down, there's no air holes in the compost.
And will you be cutting the leaves off? I will yeah because those would die back in the winter anyway.
So we don't need to worry too much about those. Trim off the leaves
and then I'm just going to pop it into water overnight.
So that's where it's going to be overnight just to get moist, and then what happens next?
So it'll probably be ready for planting out next spring so we'll pop it into our vinery
and make sure it's got some good root growth on it first and then we can put it into our shade bays
where it will harden off ready for being outside for next year. So what do you do with all these plants?
Well quite a lot of them we'll put out for sale to help raise money for Packwood.
And some of them we'll use as part of our collection as backups in case plants fail in the borders.
National Trust gardens can be a great source of inspiration,
and our gardeners and volunteers are always happy to talk so why not come and visit
one of our places or get the National Trust School of Gardening from our shop.