When I think about the kind of planting I like to see and the kind I want in my garden, I realise I am more drawn to airy, translucent, tall and diaphanous planting than any other kind. I want plants that will move with the wind, reveal what is behind and around them and also half screen the view beyond. I want prettiness, dynamism and interest.

That dictates plant choices and of course we have a lot of verbena bonariensis – which can take over and become dense and which has to be pulled out in great handfuls to maintain lightness and transparency – a constant task. Also a lot of bronze fennel (other umbellifers such as carrots and cow parsley (including the black one), seeds itself everywhere and has to be pulled out and either binned, given away or relocated, but it has such wonderful feathers which combine into darkness below and tall ochre covered flat plates of flowers above that it cannot be resisted.

Slightly more unusually verbena officinalis Bampton, easily grown from seed, has rather wonderful bronzey purple stems dotted with little pink flowers that form a gauze-y effect – here through echninacea.

At a higher level I tend to choose trees and shrubs that will have the same effect – this Eucalyptus, which I bought in France and I think is Azura – a French variety – is slow growing with a wonderful silvery blue foliage which shimmers in the sunlight and breeze.  On the right of this photo.   Olives of which I have two and more to come are equally beautiful in a similar way.

I have found a peach tree (here on the left) to offer just the kind of foliage and effect that I am looking for. And I love the Indigofera which genuinely flowers all summer in a light and airy way.

I particularly dislike the kind of unexciting and dense planting that has blocks of colour running into each other often seen nowadays in so called ‘prairie planting’ – so I am trying to create a small ‘hot prairie’ (it gets up to 40 degrees here, when it is windy the plants must feel like someone is holding a hair dryer to them) which has the same airy and transparent feel to it. Nepeta, curry plant and salvia turkestanica are both holding up well to the conditions, with Cephalaria Gigantea, Digitalis Ferruginea and various types of Molinia to come.

Which brings me to grasses. Big yawn for those monocultures of bold upright grasses (Calamagrostis I am talking to you), or feather grass. The gardening equivalent of a beige cardigan. BUT some grasses have exactly the type of airy wavy translucence that I am looking for – stipa gigantea (common but beautiful), all the Molinias. Yes I am growing them.

When I was working, and doing process improvement, we used to talk about the three ‘voices’ ;

• Voice of the customer – what do they want from the process?
• Voice of the process – a process can talk to you if you know how to listen to it – the data or results achieved and your analysis of it
• Voice of the people – what do the people who are running the process know about how it works and can be improved?

It has struck me that these voices can be equally applied to garden design.

When we were not here every day, and when we bought the field which is about another half an acre to play with, we spent many hours with various apps on my MacBookPro, laying out various areas of the garden and what we would do in them.

Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke was a German Field Marshal. The chief of staff of the Prussian Army for thirty years, he is regarded as the creator of a new, more modern method of directing armies in the field.  It was he who made the first observation that ‘no plan survives the first contact with the enemy’.   The same is true of gardening.

Our plans, written a thousand miles away, and perfectly rational and probably quite beautiful if they were implemented, took no account of the voice of the garden and little account of our own voice nor that of the customer (the visitor or observer).

Our garden (the voice of the process in process improvement terms) has spoken loud and clear to us.  Topography, soil (or clay to be more specific), views and view, pernicious weeds, badger sett, exposure and shade, grass and the path of the sun.   All of these have led us to listen to the garden and revise our plans and work with it rather than against it.   So an unexpected area of good grass has led to a lawn, the better soil is for the potager, a ‘jungle’ of tropical plants in the far corner have all revealed themselves to us rather than being written on a plan.

Our own voice – as creators and maintainers of the garden has also become clear and distinct.   Our overriding aim is not to spend our entire lives maintaining the integrity and appearance of the garden.   We don’t want maintenance free, but we don’t want a  constant uphill struggle either.  The potager is challenge enough with the amount of vegetable gardening that we are doing and our aspirations to self sufficiency, the flower borders and other areas need to be pretty and pleasing but we cannot spend ages on weeding and tidying.   What we plant has to be both resilient (Cedric will undoubtedly lie on it, probably run over it) and beautiful.

More importantly to us is for us to implement a ‘philosophy’ of the garden – a spiritual and philosophical reading that can be followed.   So it goes from a sensual garden (the potager) to a spiritual one (the Japanese garden) and on to the yew circle for contemplation and remembrance. And so on.  I don’t want to explain it all.

For our customers – these are the local people who walk past and look at what we are doing, as well as our visitors and future visitors – we are trying to create something that will be pleasing to the eye and interesting for the brain.

All I am trying to say really is that it is not possible to plan a garden on paper or on a computer – the spirit of the place and your own needs and aspirations will dictate your plans.