Today I'm at Packwood House in Warwickshire, one of my favourite National Trust gardens,
which has been really sensitively developed over the last 20 years by head gardener Mick Evans.
If you're creating or improving a garden it's good to think about the local conditions the soil,
the existing features, the building and the spirit of the place and that's something that Mick understands.
So when you came here, 20 years ago I think, what was the garden like?
Well structurally it was pretty much the same as what you see it today in so far as the buildings etc
but the lawn itself was just plain lawn,
there was no structural plants that you can see today.
and the colors are really beautiful, you've got a real way with colour. What inspired you?
Looking at the brick-built gazebos and that lovely warm terracotta, working with hot colors was probably the best way to go.
It's really working for me, the yellows against the brick is lovely,
We needed to obscure a lot of this colour because we didn't want to detract too much from the magnificence of the yew garden.
The yew-garden is something which the eye is led towards, so we wanted you to come up the steps from down below
and then all of a sudden be hit by this wall of colour, yeah, like a firework going off in the in their head.
And then are there elements of the surrounding landscape
or the building that you've factored in as well?
Yes, we've borrowed the landscape from outside, so for instance the copper beech over there
we link it in by having the phormium which at this time of the year is a very similar color.
During the earlier part of the year we use the aeonium schwarzkopf because the copper beech when it first comes out is almost like a blacky purple,
very, very dark, almost black and so is this aeonium so there's that unity, so there's linking all over the place.
So for people with much smaller gardens what what would you recommend that they consider when they're designing borders?
When you inherit a garden, it's about a year before you should start messing around with it
because you may lose a few good gems in there that you overlook by just digging everything up.
For me you sort of build the view up to a climax
by using those colors and that you create that harmony and that's what Packwood is all about.
So we've come down from the top terrace into these wonderful double borders
which I know you created a few years after you first arrived here. So what's the thinking behind them?
When I first came here, this area was kind of like a plain lawn and I was, you know, quite curious
as to what had possibly been here before so I did my research and found that before the war
there had actually been these double herbaceous borders. As the war came along this area was just dug up
and used for growing vegetables etcetera and then reseeded after the war.
It has just been a reinstated feature from the early 20th century really.
So the colours here are really different from the colours on the top terrace
and I know that you were inspired by the house so can you talk me through
how you created these borders and how you achieved this wonderful colour scheme?
So everything became again determined on what the background was. So in this case you've got this amazing rendered house
with these silvered window frames of oak and the downpipes with their little embellishments
their little motifs, so we decided to be using sort of pastel shades that would work well with this.
Also we had to figure out what kind of pathway material we wanted, it marries in beautifully with the rendering.
Silvers, greys, blues, purples work really well, we thought.
What type of soil do you have here at Packwood?
It's a fairly free-draining soil, fairly light loam as you can see and it's got plenty of organic matter in it.
Let's have a look, yeah.
A bit of stone as well, but if you squeeze it, it does hold itself together and if you just touch it, it'll crumble away quite nicely.
So it's a perfect loam with a bit of sand silt and clay.
Yeah, so we can grow a lot of things like bulbs, alliums which some people will struggle with if it's a very clay sort of wet soil
This dries out really quickly this soil, and if you look at the geraniums
now geraniums love it dry and we're forever dividing them every two to three years.
So for most people they won't have such a grand house, but there'll still be features won't there, that can inspire their planting.
If you want to create the right view don't mess around too much with a mishmash of colours
work out, say for instance, if you've got brick and then stick with that kind of either warm colour or go for a pastel shade.
If you use the the right colours you can alter anything and lift it.
National Trust gardens can be a great source of inspiration and our gardeners and volunteers are always happy to talk
so why not pop along to a garden near you or buy "The National Trust School of Gardening" from our shop.