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what decade is your garden?

imagesince I can not get out to do the garden due to the deluge from the sky,I have been thinking about the gardens here and around ,how you can tell what plants were in favor ,say the seventies.I can remember the supermarkets selling cheap plants ,for instances ,flowering current ,forsythia,and everybody's favorite the cypress tree.I look at the gardens (that have not been concreted) and see different plants from different era 's. Again pampas grass was popular until one discovered you needed a bigger garden.Of course recently you have grass's and other fashions,but  I still have the remains of sixties   roses , peonies and hydrangeas  in my garden and I been here 34 years.



  • Caz WCaz W Posts: 1,353

    I know just what you mean!  We've been gardening here for 35 years and we still have many plants from when we first started off - forsythia, variegated weigela, spirea (bridal wreath), lilacs (purple and white), berberis, honeysuckle and crocosmia.  Although we've kept up with some of the fashion these are like old friends. (except the pampasimage).

  • From invoices I inherited with the house, and from my own engagement of tree surgeons here, I think my current garden was once a 1970s conifer forest!  (you can see it now on my blog - they have all been vanquished). 

    I know I left my blue stained fence behind at my London flat in the 1990s, a reminder of that decade.

    If ground elder is connected with an era, then that's the one that lingers in my plot....

  • When I first started gardening with a very small patch, I grew the things that my father had grown.  I started my current garden in the 80s, an overgrown bit of hillside that used to be a field and it has become a cottage garden. I suppose it is mutli-decade as fashions in plants have come and gone, but I don't like to get rid of plants. I still have a blue fence but it is a little patchy nowadays.

  • PalaisglidePalaisglide Posts: 3,414

    A better question may be what Century, having grown up in a garden that had grown fruit and vegetables for nearly two hundred years I think I tried to emulate it.
    There are still plants from then passed on as things changed, the fruit and veg meagre as a treat for Grandchildren now my needs are less.
    I was never a fashion follower so the individual touch always reigned supreme.


  • What seems in vogue at the moment seems to be disposable gardens. You buy hanging baskets/pots etc at the centres and throw the lot away at the end of the season. My elderly neighbours do mostly 'unfriendly to bee' bedding and then dump the lot come the winter even if some of it would survive. I'm very much a perennial/self seeder type of gardener and I now leave some weeds if they are beneficial to insects. I am also growing a lot native wild flowers now and actively looking to target insects and birds into my garden. There is definitely a movement into bee friendly gardening coming right now which is brilliant.

  • nutcutletnutcutlet PeterboroughPosts: 26,160

    and now; don't forget all those plastic, metal, wooden, concrete things you can have instead of plants


  • Zoomer44Zoomer44 Posts: 3,212

    Going a tab bit off topic but on the theme of  'concrete things' does anyone remember when 'garden gnomes' were in fashion. Everyone seemed to have one in their garden, my view was they were the height of bad taste but nearly bought one when it became fashionable for 'your gnome' to go on holiday and gardeners received postcards from their 'missing gnomes' on their travels.image


  • LilylouiseLilylouise Posts: 1,013

    We have had our garden for about 25 years and were lucky that it was a blank canvas so that we could do what we wanted. It has changed many times over the years and just evolved to what it is today. We still change bits that we aren't happy with but really do love our garden - I know it isn't  to everyones taste image I used to grow bedding like  Muvs neighbours but for a few years now I have grown Bee friendly bedding plants and right through the year there are plants flowering in the for the Bees to enjoy so I hope we are doing our bit for Bee conservation image

    Pam LL x

  • happymarionhappymarion Posts: 4,591

    I have been looling after my garden for 48 years but still have some of the plants i inherited and loved immmediately like Geranium "Johnsons Blue"and Primula "Wanda".  I have lots of the perennial herbs like thyme, rosemary, marjoram and mint the gardener used to grow for the housekeeper back then and still grow lots of strawberries as they had beds and beds of them.  My garden has always been friendly to wildlife, including seven children and seven grandchildren.  They have had a football pitch, tennis court, badminton court, three storied treehouse, dinosaur bones museums, garden plots of their own, and I still have the snooker table in the old gypsy caravan.  But throughout it all I have grown masses of fruit and veg and flowers.  Fashion has not touched it much until recently when I found that at 84 the fashion for raised beds and no-dig gardening suited me down to the ground or rather up from the ground!

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