The foregoing paving plants do not restrict themselves to the spaces left for them but make big mats covering great surfaces of stone. Other carpeters creep along between the stones, filling all the cracks with greenery but hardly intruding above ground. My favourite is Mentha Requienii, the tiny creeping mint, with bright green leaves and the tiniest pale mauve flowers. The scent is strong when you press a finger on it, but the time I am most grateful for its fragrance is in the winter, when I brush snow from the paving and the heady scent comes up in waves. I used to think the creeping pennyroyal, Mentha Pulegium, was as neat and self-effacing as Mentha Requienii, but on closer acquaintance I find it likes to spread itself in rather untidy loops and flusters. But its scent is pleasantly pungent and I wouldn’t be without it. The acaenas offer new foliage colour, A. Buchananii is silvery grey with yellow burrs, while A. microphylla (or A. inermis) has bronze fern-like foliage and crimson spiny flowers. Arenaria balearica will cover everything in sight when it once gets going. It likes to work in damp shady places and then it gets as busy as helxine. But no one minds, so fine and bright is the foliage and so star-like are the tiny white flowers with which it smothers itself in April and May. The cotulas are not very exciting but they make tiny lawns of bright green between the stones. Dresden china daisies are still among the best plants for growing in paving. They enjoy the cool root run and increase rapidly, and they never wander beyond their ascribed domain. Their little bright pink flowers are always welcome, and there is a white version called The Pearl, which looks entrancing in a dark corner. The bigger crimson daisy, Rob Roy, I prefer to use in a flower bed, close up against a paved path. It seems a little too fleshy to grow in paving, but in a bed, where it can spread itself, it makes a delightful crimson accent. Read the rest of this entry »

The only garden in front of the house was a narrow strip filling in the space made by the L of the house. When we bought the house it was a forest of rusty laurels, and the earth was so heavy and dead that even they showed no enthusiasm. High humpy beds were banked half way up the walls.

We dug out the laurels and levelled the ground and laid crazy paving. It was our first attempt at paving and it wasn’t a good job. The ground wasn’t as perfectly level as it should be for crazy paving, we left cracks between the stones which were much too wide, and we didn’t anchor the stones with joggles of concrete.

I planted everything I could between the stones but not nearly enough to deter the weeds. The uneven stones became covered with earth that was washed up, and encouraged more weeds. Read the rest of this entry »