Garden Tour BURSTING with Color, Creativity & a HYDRANGEA WATERFALL!!!!!!!

Good morning friends. I am thrilled to be sharing this garden tour with you today. In today's video we're going to head over to Kent, England to visit the garden of Apple P. Fern C. Now I first discovered this wonderful gardening YouTube channel when I was trying to find a garden tour of Sissinghurst Castle and they have so many wonderful videos that take place in their gardens and also in really famous gardens over in the UK that some of us over in the U.S. can only ever dream of visiting. So without further ado let's head to Kent, England to see this gorgeous garden full of color, inspiration, and life. It is an absolute honor to be invited by Danielle to give a tour of our small English garden. Thank you Danielle and a warm welcome to everyone in this month of bounty. When the days are still long plants grow strong and the sowing and nurture of earlier seasons makes good on the promise of floral rewards. We live in Kent in the southeast corner of England, the closest county to mainland Europe. Our inland site is equivalent to USDA zone 8. We generally experience warm dry summers with occasional extreme drought but with the variability of the jet stream there can be cool wet and stormy summer periods too which we've just experienced. Winters generally bring frost, a smattering of snow, and occasionally heavy snowfall which doesn't last long. Around 25 years ago we moved here to a new build house on a brownfield site with a gently sloping bare plot of earth with what felt like a meter deep of rubble to dig out. The garden covers a hundred square meters including our patio. I still remember the feeling of excitement and possibility having an opportunity to grow a garden and watch it evolve from a completely blank canvas to the mature composition today that is part purposeful design and part nature's intervention. Nature's design contributions include bright and cheerful color splashes of self-seeded perennial Welsh poppies growing in containers and between paving slabs where their roots enjoy the cool damp conditions. They provide a fabulously rich source of pollen and nectar for foraging bumblebees. Ferns have found their niche in the brick walls of the shady raised bed and have fanned out beneath this bronze planter almost like a considered design statement. Through the seasons this planter displays the flowers of perennial hellebore pink frost in spring foxgloves in early summer. And as summer advances the annual begonias add a tropical touch to this lush shady pocket of the garden. There's a lot of competition in this shallow container but I love the way that by autumn the begonias subtly weave themselves through the evergreen hellebore leaves in a gentle tapestry. On the sunnier side of the garden a self-seeded buddleia provides a tower of bee-friendly flower panicles. We enjoy pairing a rather loose eclectic floral approach with the more formal architectural elements offered by topiary evergreens and the symmetry of hard landscaping which provides a sense of structural presence in the garden all year round. The lavender rondel in the centre of the lawn was our starting point for the design. I laid the paths using recycled bricks. Lavender is an excellent choice to give a brand new garden or sunny well-drained border a more established feel as it quickly fills the space with colour and scent, is drought tolerant and brings in pollinators. As the planting evolved we punctuated the curved beds with four boxwood topiary balls which helps keep the lavender looking smart even when summer storms splay out the stems in all directions. Almost all the other boxwood topiary in the garden has been grown from tiny twigs which is good for the budget but does require patience. We try to create the sense of a well-tended but wildlife-friendly garden. For example we use broken pots buried in the flower beds and this helps hibernating toads over winter and sometimes you have bumblebees nesting there. Our small pond attracts frogs which help control the slug and snail population. Frogs each have their favourite flower pot spots to occupy. They seem to like nestling down in cool damp gravel. Our southwest facing patio has a large collection of containers filled with a mixture of perennial plants and summer annuals. Many grown from seed in spring on window sills indoors and transferred outside when the risk of frost has passed. We love growing shorter varieties of which are not only beneficial to big boisterous bumblebees and small shy solitary bees but also attract butterflies and beneficial predatory insects like hover flies and lacewings that feed on aphids. Sonata pink is a particularly floriferous cultivar. I deadhead all plants regularly so that energy is not diverted into making seed. Rubenza is absolutely enchanting opening with plisade petals in a deep saturated ruby red gradually fading to an antique Scandinavian pink. Xanthos is a sweetly pretty soft shade of primrose yellow and like its cosmos cousins has attractive fresh feathery foliage. Its flower heads are slightly smaller but it more than compensates for this with abundant blooms. Yellow is often described by professionals as a challenging color to integrate into the garden palette but the gentle primrose petals of Xanthos work in harmony with both warm colors such as reds and oranges and cool tones such as blues and purples. There are many benefits to container gardening. We can ensure that soil or compost is fully suited to the plant's needs be it acid or alkaline, gritty or enriched. Containers can also be moved around as some plants fade and others approach their zenith so that the display stays fresh and dynamic and with larger pots we swap in concealed plastic containers for a changing seasonal display. In winter and spring we also group together lightweight pots on the garden table for a raised bulb theater enjoyed through the window from indoors and for those who find ground planting or dealing with low-level pots challenging this offers a very accessible form of gardening. In one of the very first Northlawn Flower Farm videos we discovered Danielle was creating one of her beautiful hand-tied bouquets with freshly harvested flowers and it struck me that such glorious floral bunches are perfect for providing inspiration to approaching patio container arrangements too because thinking about staging a group of pots together is very much like creating an interesting and balanced bouquet of blooms. There are the immediately eye-catching generous big impact flowers and here our summer show stealers include Delia Lou Farman with a delicious watermelon flair at the base of pink petals elegantly fading to a soft shade of champagne pink and Shirley Poppy an annual we've grown for the first time this year. Some plants have big blousy petals others are more subtle and all are beloved by bees who don't always enter by the front door and as with a bouquet there is repetition to create a pleasing visual rhythm plus some natural looking elements to help add a softer more romantic texture. The lacy unbelieverous flowers of Amimagus another seed grown annual seem to float in a cloud of delicate stars and foliage is important too to provide a sense of lushness and textural contrast. The fabulously serrated leaves of Honeybush Melianthus Major are surprisingly soft to touch the rich plummy leafage of the smoke bush provides a deep toned backdrop to highlight the beauty and colour of surrounding blooms. We love when Danielle encourages us all to bring our personality into our flower arrangements whatever makes our hearts sing and there couldn't be any better advice for a container display. One of the summer perennials that makes our hearts sing the firework flower heads of Agapanthus. This year they have been somewhat slow motion fireworks opening at a reluctant pace due to cooler than average spells. To me the intense blue of African skies is the embodiment of a feel-good summer vibe. We've paired it here with perennial salvia black and blue which would grow to over two meters in height if planted in the ground. I think it's only fair to put it on into a larger container to let it make more of a statement and look its best for early autumn. I'm also besotted with the gorgeously rich dark purple tones of Sumptuous Blackjack, a long blooming and repeat flowering cultivar which is just beginning to open. In low evening light its petals glow with illumination like stained glass. In containers perched on the retaining wall of our raised bed we grow the Agapanthus Popping Purple which like the other cultivars is evergreen and has a pretty lilac glow inside each of the fan fair petals opening from inky buds. It is popular with hoverflies and tiny moths as well as bees and of course the smaller pollinators are an equally vital part of a healthy garden ecosystem. It looks beautifully harmonious with the heavenly pale blue stars of Isotoma. Popping Purple produces numerous flower stems and reblooms into early autumn. It seems to be a hardier cultivar than our other Agapanthus which are stored under cover for the winter season. Popping Purple survives against the warm brick wall of the house in the rain shadow of the eves. We grow edibles as well as ornamentals. Fresh lemon verbena leaves steeped in hot water is one of my favourite refreshing teas and we dry leaves in autumn for a winter supply of the taste of summer. Thyme, rosemary and bay are on hand for culinary use as well as for their attractive evergreen foliage and aromatic qualities. Very sadly in the first half of this year our pair of mature Red Windsor apple trees and containers were seriously affected by the combination of exceptionally heavy rainfall and insufficient drainage for such incessant saturation. One tree has retained its foliage, the other is bare, currently draped in artificial ivy. Despite this weather related setback with no apple harvest for us and the birds to enjoy in late summer, one group of plants seem to enthusiastically embrace the exceptionally wet first half of the year, our hydrangeas. This is the hydrangea waterfall even though petals are pink rather than blue. A few years ago I felt frustration at the way the branches with flower heads all seemed to bow and tumble over rather than standing upright but we began thinking of them as a cascade falling around box ball boulders. We placed one upright hydrangea in a raised pot above them to represent a fountain head and the hydrangea arrangement suddenly became a purposeful feature, a cascading waterfall rather than a failed upright display. Sometimes to feel happy with our plants performance all it takes is a little tweak to our own perceptions. The name of our channel Apple Pea Fern Sea comes from the myriad of soothing and beautiful hues found on the green colour spectrum in nature's glorious palette. The crisp fresh apple greens with yellow tones, the soothing comfort of pea greens, the mysterious deep forest fern greens and the light reflective blue-toned green-grey and silvery sea greens. It is said that the human eye can detect more shades of green than any other colour but for now it's a colourful and flower-filled thank you to everyone for joining us today. We hope you've enjoyed our summer garden tour and from Kent in southeast England to south central Pennsylvania it's back to Danielle. Wasn't that one of the most beautiful and serene garden tours you've ever seen? I'm so inspired by her hydrangea waterfall and not only the fact that she created a hydrangea waterfall but that she took something that she felt was a negative in her garden and turned it into a positive focal point. So friends if you do me a big favor let's show Apple Pea Fern Sea love and support by heading over to their channel and subscribing. They have so many wonderful videos to watch in their garden, in public gardens and just the sound of her beautiful voice paired with the beautiful sounds of nature and her beautiful photography really brings so much and when you watch a video like this where there's so many different clips and the quality of the picture and the sound is so beautiful you really know that the creator has put so much time and effort to creating a beautiful video for us to enjoy and why not support them every way that we can. It's completely free to subscribe, like, comment and share these YouTube videos. Well friends I want to wish you a wonderful day out there in your gardens. Thanks again to Apple Pea Fern Sea. I don't think you can see Grace right now. There's her little nose but I'm going to go take her for a walk. I wish you a wonderful day out there in your gardens and I'll see you sometime soon. Bye friends!