If you garden by the sea you have to put up with the wind, or contrive what shelter you can. A famous garden on the shingle at Dungeness made its name with the former; one we have just visited in Cumbria ingeniously enjoys both extravagant planting and its views over Morecambe Bay within, let’s say, a bow shot rather than a stone’s throw of the sea. The solid barrier of a wall would create its own problems of wicked eddies and sneaky draughts. The preferred formula of filtering the wind calls for a screen of some kind; usually trees, that eventually lean to leeward.
At Low Frith gardening fells unconstrained, taking advantage of a range of farm buildings, the principal, a barn with its wall rising on the sheltered side, used intensively as home for delicate plants, potting shed, tool shed, and wet day resort for less hardy gardeners. It calls for a profusion of pots, robust eighteen inchers that need a sack barrow to move them and at least a barrowful of compost to fill them, not to mention dedication to water and feed them. They permit otherwise improbable combinations of plants that need totally different soils, not to mention altering their juxtapositions to suit their flowering, fruiting and the changes in the colour of their leaves.
At Low Frith a whole cohort have just been moved into, of course, a courtyard. Any new potted plants are on the small side, but so gleaming in perfect health that you stop to admire them. What is the group word for pelargoniums? Plethora sounds right to describe a score of plants pushing the limits of variety, from polished- to furry-leaved and every shade between white and crimson.
