For the first time, dedicated gardeners in Wagrain-Kleinarl invited all garden lovers and interested people in the valley to get to know their private gardens and green spaces from the inside on Sunday, 25 June 2023. To a day of meeting, exchanging, chatting, marvelling and talking shop or simply exploring.
We also took part with our garden and invited you to experience the many areas with perennials, many of them signposted and described, to browse through our garden books and to experience the fascination of “perennials” in exchange with us. In beautiful summer weather, we were pleased about the many interested guests and the pleasant conversations.
We prepared intensively for this Open Garden Day. One hundred plants were provided with signs informing about name, botanical name, height of growth, flowering time and flower colour, habitat and humidity and light requirements. We created an overview plan for the garden and presented our thoughts about the garden in an information sheet.
The garden as a vision
Thoughts and guidelines on the garden and garden design
- Flowering all the way through: from spring with the various bulb flowers until late autumn, there should always be something flowering in the beds. In principle, regional plants are preferred, but to extend the flowering period into late summer and autumn, (American) prairie perennials and perennials of other origins are indispensable. Many of these “foreign” perennials are also very well accepted by insects and provide them with food when the food supply in the wild is already very low.
- No garden or bed without grasses: Grasses are wonderful structure builders and indispensable in every bed. As with perennials, there are suitable grasses for every area.
- Consideration of the living areas: Perennials are selected according to location so that no watering – except for new plantings – is necessary. To support moisture in the beds, the beds are mulched. I only use larch mulch, but this is a matter of personal taste.
- Flower colours in the individual beds at the main flowering time according to the colour wheel: I limit myself to a few colours in the individual beds, which I select according to Itten’s colour wheel. In some beds I use complementary colours such as blue and violet with orange. In other beds, I use colours that lie next to each other, such as violet and pink. In the shade beds there is no colour scheme, because there the flower colour plays a subordinate role compared to the leaf decoration. In the rose bed, too, there is a deliberate predominance of colourfulness.
- Structures are just as important as the flower colours: Almost more important to me than the flower colour when choosing a plant is the structure of the plant, the shape of the leaves and the shape of the flower. I try to create a variety of different structures and shapes in the beds. Deliberately, flower and fruit heads are also left as long as possible.
- There is no height grading in the beds: now and then I plant low perennials at the edges, otherwise there is no grading by size in the beds. The perennials are planted in small groups, in drifts or individually and repeated several times in the bed if possible. The desire is to give the perennial beds a near-natural, meadow-like character (naturalistic garden design).
- Naturalistic garden: The most important criteria for a natural garden are followed, such as composting, renouncing peat and chemical, synthetic pesticides and fertilisers. Promoting biodiversity is an important concern, which is why there are also less well-kept and “wild” corners in the garden, in addition to nesting boxes, bird baths and bird feeders. Our garden has been awarded the “Nature in the Garden” certificate >>> see article “Nature in the Garden Certification”.
