Did you get a chance to visit us this summer? If not (and even if you did), we’ve just released a new video that offers all garden lovers a tour of White Flower Farm’s Lloyd Border in the company of our head gardener Cheryl Whalen.
“The Lloyd,” as it’s known around here, is the brainchild of White Flower Farm’s owner, Eliot Wadsworth, who years ago chose to turn a large expanse of lawn in the midst of the Litchfield countryside into a mixed border in the English style. His aim: to create a garden with a long season of interest in New England. To design the garden, Mr. Wadsworth enlisted Fergus Garrett, steward of England’s Great Dixter, the world-renowned family home of the late gardener and gardening writer Christopher Lloyd. Garrett’s design, which was installed beginning in 2001, mixes trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals with the goal of ensuring a continual succession of bloom from spring to fall.
If you have the privilege, as we do, of seeing the Lloyd Border develop and change over the course of an entire season, you’re treated to successive waves of bloom and color, form and fragrance, and to the glorious alliances that occur when plants are successfully combined.
Our new video captures the Lloyd during one “moment” in 2016 – a late summer day when the garden is at a peak stage of bloom, filled with the flowers and colors of Russian Sage, Rudbeckias, Dahlias, Zinnias, Verbena bonariensis, Ageratum, Phlox, Nicotiana, Sedum, Tagetes Marigolds, Salvias, and plenty more.
The garden changes each year, largely because there are new plants or plant combinations to try, but its essential bones remain the same.
You can build your own garden in the same manner as the Lloyd, anchoring your space with small trees, shrubs and ornamental grasses in repeating patterns that define the garden and give it year-round structure. Fill in with perennials that return each year to provide color and texture, and leave designated spaces for annuals, which, because they’re planted each spring, can be changed year to year according to the gardener’s whims.
Click the link, take the tour, and you may come away with some ideas and plant combinations for next season’s garden.
