I'm sure you share my high hopes that the Russian sage (perovskia atriplicifolia) I just planted will prove to be the pi�ce de r�sistance, the jewel in the crown, the icing on the cake, the ...

Well, you catch my drift.

Since I've been re-doing parts of my main perennial border, it has come to my attention that there is a shocking lack of blue in that garden. I have no rational explanation for this, since blue is my favourite flower colour. All I can say is that I forgot to ask myself, "What Would Gertrude Do?"

Yep, just as certain born again folks ask themselves What Would Jesus Do?, gardeners in times of trouble turn to Gertrude Jekyll.

The biography I've linked to gives you the outline of her life and a sense of her influence. An interesting thing it leaves out is that both she and another painter/gardener I *heart*, Claude Monet, both made their most interesting gardens after cataracts damaged their vision and turned their view of the world into blurry smears of colour.

(Not that I have any interest in going partially blind for my gardens, but now I know that if I want to see how they REALLY look I need to scrinch up my eyes (scrinch being a technical gardening term) until everything looks a bit blurry and smeary.)

Anyone still awake? I thought not ...

So anyhow, this is how my garden looks right now. It's kind of dull because it's taking a big breath just before it goes mental and puts on a very wonderful fall show that will survive several minor frosts before finally being croaked by one major killer frost.

There will be yellow and wine coloured helenium and four or five perennial asters ranging from purple to hot pink to white.

Then it will be done, winter will move in, and the primary colour in my life will be white.

Next year I will get an indication if my latest ideas are good, if the 20 per cent or so of the garden I've dug up and replaced with other stuff over the last two weeks is actually an improvement. The year after, the effect will be more pronounced and three years from now my border will give me my final answer, the plants will have filled in by then.

Except by that time I will have dicked around with other parts of it so really I'm never going to get a final answer. Even you know what? That suits me just fine.

Garden writers like Gertrude Jekyll most definitely believe in final answers, they are passionate about the rightness of their opinions. I love the best garden writers because they write with an "I am Moses and here is a bunch of stuff written in stone and if you don't agree with me then you are REALLY REALLY wrong."

The thing is that you can slavishly follow what they say to do, or you can read them carefully and think about the "why" of what they're saying to do.

For instance, Gertrude tells you that your border should begin and end with low plants in the blue range. Why? Because blue is a recessive colour and it disappears, it makes your border blend into the background.

So what did I do? If you go back and look at old pictures of my garden, you'll see that I actually ended it in very tall yellow stuff, which means I set Gertrude on her head. (Which must have been very uncomfortable for a woman that age, no matter how long she's been dead.)

See, I don't live on hundreds of acres of manicured estate, I live in a relatively small clearing set in a forest. I didn't want my garden to disappear, I wanted it in your face. I wanted it to jump up and down and scream, "Hey, look at me, look .. at .. MEEEEEE."

And it does. Without Gertrude telling me that low and blue disappears, I'm not sure I would have come to the realization that bright yellow and tall were what I needed to make someone drag their eyes along the length of my garden and not lose sight of it against the woods.

Parts of my garden would please this eccentric, unbending Englishwoman. She would like the way I grouped my ligularia (yellow spikes) with the echinops ritro (blue balls) and echinicea purpurea (to the right of the blue balls you can't see it in this picture). I followed her advice to combine different flower shapes, colours and leaf shapes for maximum visual interest even when the plant isn't in bloom.

And she would hate the ends of my border with a passion and tell me I'm stupid and wrong because there's nothing gradual about the edges.

But it's right for me, and that's what counts.

I've found that throughout my life there have been lots of people trying to tell me what to do, and how to think. I've also found that almost everyone has something of value to teach me, if I looked closely at what they were telling me.

The thing is, the lesson I took away was not always the one they intended.