The Health Insight

Call me an old romantic but there’s something special about walking across a path or paved area where the hard surfaces are interspersed with a living smorgasbord of flowering and scented plants. The amazing nosegay from crushing aromatic herbs such as thyme or chamomile underfoot and seeing drifts of Aubretia or Arabis spilling over and softening the hard edges of paving slabs or bricks is something to behold - but I appreciate that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

However, leaving aside the aesthetics, there is another good reason why leaving a few ‘gaps’ in a hard paved surface and filling it with a permeable mix of gravels and free draining soil (with or without the plants) is a very sensible idea – and that is to act as a drainage channel. Anything to soak up the torrents of rainwater we are subjected to these days has to be seen as a positive - something impossible with a sleek, contemporary expanse of uber-pristine porcelain paving. Which is why I believe that gaps are definitely a thing these globally warmed days and we should be treating them with the deference they deserve, plus using them as a feature in their own right.

When I inherited my current garden, it was a sea of hard landscaping and overgrown planting – a complete mess, but I could see it had great bones and had the perfect south facing aspect. Not only was it completely walled with beautiful local stone but there was a considerable amount of very valuable (and heavy!) old York stone slabs of various sizes and shapes. So, after considering a design I jotted down (not on the back of a fag packet I

might add) I relocated all the slabs I wanted to keep and decided that I would try and recreate the style of Sissinghurst – a famous old garden created by Vita Sackville-West in the days before global warming was invented. She embraced the laid-back romantic style perfectly with plants invading every nook and cranny (gaps!) giving the garden a feel of gay abandonment, although it was a nightmare for anyone suffering from OCD.

As the York stone slabs were so heavy (think Stonehenge!) I didn’t bother with any sub-base or mortar and laid them directly onto the soil with a trowel width(ish) gap in between each one. Once I’d filled the gaps with a good free draining soil mix, I could then think about ‘romanticising’ the paths and some of the sitting areas with a mix of plants and small bulbs – a process made slightly easier by finding a great source of small plants at a quid a throw from the local cash and carry. Not every

small plant is suitable for this type of arrangement as they have to have a degree of toughness about them, as life can be hard when you are tiny and a Size 10 boot occasionally squashes you into the ground.

The best type of plant is generally classed as an Alpine in garden centres and includes such things as pinks, sisyinchiums, aubretia, cyclamen, Arabis, creeping phlox, and the smaller campanulas. Herbs are an essential ingredient, especially thyme in all its various forms, and they thrive in our hot and sunny courtyard, seeding themselves into even the tightest gaps. That’s the thing about filling the gaps – you can go for the instant look and fill every bit of space with a plant you’ve bought in or buy just a few and wait for them to seed themselves around. I think you’ll find that the latter is the best and cheapest option – plus you get the excitement of waiting to see what turns up!