A Riot Of Colour

In this cottage garden, the plants decide where they’d like to grow!

- Marié Esterhuyse

The flowers in Petra Derksen’s colourful front garden have free rein to come up wherever they want. “Only my roses, Japanese flowering crab apple and a few perennials grow in the same spot year after year. All the other plants are left to set seed and to germinate wherever that seed may land in the beds,” Petra explains. “When the flowering season is over, I also collect handfuls of seed and scatter it all over, with the result that the garden looks different every year.”

The five beds that form the core of Petra’s front garden are edged with narrow paving stones, with a brown gravel path running between them. The four smaller beds, with a birdbath in the middle, are framed by low hedges of Australian brush cherry (Syzygium paniculatum); Australian rosemary (Westringia fruticosa) is planted around the larger bed. All the hedges are trimmed regularly to keep them neat, especially in summer.

The beds are filled with a variety of annuals and perennials that bloom at different times of the year, with a profusion of colour in spring and summer especially. Annuals such as poppies, sweet peas, calendulas and hollyhocks provide seasonal colour while roses, salvias, Marguerite daisies and garden heliotropes are more permanent and have a longer flowering season. The roses and perennials are pruned in winter, and then the garden is dormant.