Back in June, a border in St James's Park was planted out with tropical plants. It looked awesome, and it really flourished over the next few months.
You may remember that, at the time I said:
Rows of chuffin' pansies!!! And they looked pretty crappy - the wires stretched out didn't seem to have prevented the wood pigeons chomping away. It just looked lazy and frankly boring. There are all sorts of plants that look at their best at this time of year, and if the Royal Parks lot can afford a dozen 6ft Dicksonia antarctica for their summer border, they can bloody well afford a few nice pot-grown Hamamelis of different colours. And what about dogwoods and willows? Ferns, heucheras, Cyclamen, different coloured conifers - a few Pinus mugo "Carsten's Wintergold", some Podocarpus. All would have provided gorgeous winter colour, and would have looked equally beautiful in that glaring sunshine we get at this time of year, the fog that's settling over London as I type, or covered in frost and snow.
Please, Royal Parks, can we have something a bit more interesting than pansies? I've given you a plant list. Get onto it.
You may remember that, at the time I said:
[B]orders like this make a change from the neat rows of pansies in the more municipal beds you see on roundabouts and the like.So my heart sank today when I passed by the old border to see this:
Rows of chuffin' pansies!!! And they looked pretty crappy - the wires stretched out didn't seem to have prevented the wood pigeons chomping away. It just looked lazy and frankly boring. There are all sorts of plants that look at their best at this time of year, and if the Royal Parks lot can afford a dozen 6ft Dicksonia antarctica for their summer border, they can bloody well afford a few nice pot-grown Hamamelis of different colours. And what about dogwoods and willows? Ferns, heucheras, Cyclamen, different coloured conifers - a few Pinus mugo "Carsten's Wintergold", some Podocarpus. All would have provided gorgeous winter colour, and would have looked equally beautiful in that glaring sunshine we get at this time of year, the fog that's settling over London as I type, or covered in frost and snow.
Please, Royal Parks, can we have something a bit more interesting than pansies? I've given you a plant list. Get onto it.
0 comments:
Post a Comment