This week a sudden cold snap brought a stunning hoar frost.
Where heavy rains last autumn flattened much of the perennial plantings, this year we were gifted a dry, bright October and early November allowing the plants to hold their form and structure beautifully well into December.
Walking into our garden project in Stirling was like stepping into Narnia. Every leaf and stem seemed to be encrusted with ice crystals, frozen in time and motion, highlighting the architecture of each individual plant as well as the garden as a whole.
The desaturated light stripped the day to near monochrome revealing soft greens and pale golds amongst the white. Certain colours stood out such as the evergreen leaves of holly and red flowers of skimmias, the blackened seedheads of anemones.
Walking around the garden on a day like this is a lesson in paying closer attention to texture and form. It invites us to notice every detail that might normally pass us by.
Mediterranean planting designer Olivier Filippi encourages designers to look at black and white images of plantscapes to understand how a garden in a dry hot climate looks in summer once the colour and flowers have been stripped back by the drought. Reducing the plants to shapes and textures makes us appreciate their rhythm and architecture in the wider setting.
It shows us where light and shadow fall, where calm and quiet sit amongst noisier areas and where we might introduce restraint and pause or movement and mass as we develop the planting in the new year.
It’s always refreshing to see a garden through new eyes, especially on a day as freezingly beautiful as this was.
words & images: Lucy Head