Gardening: Three steps to a great garden

Weekend workshop: gloomy, vertiginous and shaded - a Bristol backyard provides many horticultural possibilities

What does one do with a gloomy, north-facing, small back yard surrounded on three sides by the walls of houses. Approximately five feet higher than the yard is a small garden. If I were a stalwart gardener, I would remove the top 11/2 feet of soil and replace it with good top soil, but I took an easier route and merely put in plants.

Would my garden appear larger if it were levelled, covered with South Cerney gravel and plants in pots? The present planting lacks any theme, and is the plant equivalent of one of those blankets made from knitted squares.

Michael Shotter's garden perches, as though on the top of a cliff, in St Werburgh's, where Bristol takes on the plunging, rearing, vertiginous hills on its northern boundary. At the bottom of his street is the Bristol Climbing Centre. Apt. With a set of crampons, I could have made the ascent to the top of the street in great style.

The picture of the garden he painted in his letter is much gloomier than the reality. "Ah well!" he said, when I pointed this out. "That's what comes of being a systems analyst. You're always looking for problems."

The back door of the house opens onto the yard he mentioned. Yes, it is north facing, but it is certainly not gloomy. All the walls are whitewashed, the ground is paved in handsome slabs of local stone and two big tubs were producing hostas with leaves as big as table mats. No slug holes. "Aaah" said Mr Shotter again and started burrowing in the foliage with that intense and anxious expression common to all gardeners on a slug hunt.

All it needed was some height and perhaps a few plants allowed to run along the cracks between the paving stones. Since the hostas disappear underground for the winter, I would choose an evergreen plant for stature, perhaps one huge, handsome Euphorbia characias in a half barrel. It is a `spurge' that holds itself well, looks good all year round and, in our garden at least, is entirely without vice or disease.

And for the cracks in the paving, perhaps one of the neat Campanulas, such as the `Dalmatian bellflower', C. portenschlagiana. It, too, is evergreen, with neat kidney shaped leaves and rich purple blue flowers. It is a much easier plant to live with than its cousin, the grey blue C. poscharskyana, which rampages about in the pavement outside Mr Shotter's house. He certainly shouldn't let that loose in his garden.

The yard and the top garden, five feet higher, are joined by six steep, narrow steps, which run up the left hand boundary wall. The two areas sit well together. The yard, at 7ft 6ins by 14ft, is longer than it is wide and is set at right angles to the top garden which is wider than it is long. That runs the whole width of the garden, giving an area roughly 15ft wide by 9ft long.

In fact most of it is not as long as that. Some of it is taken up by a third small area. An outside lavatory, scooped out of the bank at the back, originally had a lean-to, tiled roof. Mr Shotter took the roof off, levelled the top of the building and covered it with stone slabs, making a platform roughly 9ft by 4ft, higher again than the second level. So, although the garden overall is small, it has three distinct territories. In design terms, that is a huge advantage.

Now if this were my garden, I would cram the whole of this high, open display area with terracotta pots, filled with Geraniums, Fuchsias, and sweet-smelling Acidanthera for summer. In spring the pots would be full of tulips. There were a few Geraniums there, but the most dominant feature was a bush of Lonicera nitida, a drear shrub in any circumstances, but particularly here, with space so precious.

"Out with it", I urged Mr Shotter. "Aah, yes," he replied. Some umbilical cord tied him to that shrub. I sympathise. It's so much easier to tell other people to throw things away than do the same thing oneself. I have a hideously disfigured bamboo in a pot displayed in a prominent position. It should have gone long ago, but I can't bear to think of it sobbing on the compost heap.

And the raised stone platform has another use as an outdoor potting bench, where Mr Shotter brings on seedlings for his allotment down the road. Where could all that be done, if not here? The cane chair set against the right hand boundary next to the stone stage spoke of productive hours spent in this spot, pricking out cabbages and lettuce, sowing tomato seed, transplanting courgettes. Room for that though at the far end, behind the barrage of Mediterraneana that this particular area calls out for.

As Mr Shotter's letter indicated, the area that needs most thought is the intermediate one, between yard and raised stone platform. It has good boundaries of local stone. Behind is hilly pasture belonging to a city farm, ungrazed and filling up with noxious weeds.

From the cane seat, there is an extraordinary view to the west, over plunging terraces of houses that stumble down the hill, then climb up the slope on the far side of the valley. Spires and towers of various parish churches loom up out of the roofs like trees in parkland. So you would not want to plant anything to obscure that grand panorama.

At present, a narrow gravel path, edged with stone, leads from the steps to the seat, making a dog leg on the way. Mr Shotter is right in thinking the area might look better if it were treated as a discrete whole. The garden already divides itself very nicely into three distinct territories. Further subdivisions here verge on the fussy.

So, away with the path. That means redistributing the soil, which at the moment is slightly higher in the bed against the back boundary than it is in the front one. But not dramatically so. Drainage is sharp, as you would expect and I would gravel the whole area and plant it with pinks, rosemary, thyme, dwarf bulbs such as Anemone `de Caen' and crocus for spring; houseleeks for their fabulous sculpted leaves; Arum italicum `Pictum' tucked under one of the shady walls, Cyclamen, both the spring and the autumn flowering kinds, Scillas, Aquilegias, Shirley poppies of the most diaphonous kind, bearded iris, Alliums, snaky ground hugging Euphorbia myrsinites, and some Polypodia ferns. Violas such as `Ardross Gem' would make mats in a shady area.

But not in pots. The effect should be Persian carpet, rather than knitted squares. Woven, not welded. That means putting in more than one of each plant and letting each group flow into its neighbour, as though it had seeded itself there.

It also means getting rid of monsters such as the common laurel which Mr Shotter has planted here. The area is open, light and bright. The foliage of pinks, `spurge', rosemary, thyme, Arum cyclamen, Aquilegias and fern will provide all the background necessary for quiet contemplation of flowers.

I would also do away with the rampageous evergreen honeysuckle which has taken over the whole of the back boundary. To keep it off the flower beds, it has to be sheared in a way that displays its brown, dead underpinnings rather more vividly than its fresh growth and flowers. But that would be pushing the gentle Mr Shottter too far. After another five years gardening, he will have discovered for himself that there are many better ways of treating a fine stone south facing wall.