Beach Trail

I'm sure I share this fantasy with a few other gardeners- designing a themed garden for a major flower show. One theme I know that will be on my list of possibles will most definitely be some kind of coastal natural garden. What would be my inspiration? The first thing that comes to mind is Derek Jarman's Dungeness Garden, but I also have mental notes for the clumps of fennel that grew wild on the edges of the beaches in Spain when I visited the Andalusian coast or the wild Sweet Peas and Rugosas on the dunes in Rhode Island. But most of all it would be what I see on this bike trail that takes you to Herring Cove Beach.

It would be easy enough to stage the sand and the bleached skeletons of trees, the lichen and moss and strewn pine needles, the fiery red of the devils ivy, but so much of it is also the movement- the nodding grasses and swaying seedheads and berries, the sunlight behind the leaves, sparkling through the branches and most of all the thing that struck me most the first time I came here a few years ago - the incredible smell of pine and salted air.

Soundtrack: Grizzly Bear, On A Neck, On A Spit from Yellow House