In Your Garden: Lilee Cathcart

“We’ve been in our garden for less than a year. We were lucky to inherit a collection of mature shrubs from the previous owner who had lived in the house for twenty years, which gives the garden a secluded atmosphere even though it’s overlooked on all sides. Having gardened previously in pots at the front of our flat, I was very excited to have somewhere to call my own, not to mention soil to plant into.

Not long after we moved in, I dug up the lawn to create space for as many flowers as I could possibly cram in. Our old pot garden was under the shade of a large Robinia tree for much of the year, so I filled the new beds with all the sun-loving plants I had never been able to grow.

However, my real love is for shady woodland plants, so I was delighted to find that the bottom half of the garden is under the shade of a plane tree. Here, I planted some of my favourite woodland ephemerals – erythroniums, cardamine, uvularia and anemones.

I work professionally as a gardener in South East London, so my garden is a place to experiment with growing as many new plants as possible. I’m trying to master the art of successional planting, adhering to the Christopher Lloyd mantra of ‘no bare soil’ from mid-March to October. Our little garden is pretty full now, but I still have a huge list of plants I want to grow. My dad says I have a ‘plant problem’. He’s probably right.”

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