The most talked-about exhibit at last month’s Hampton Court Flower Show was a modest-sized, windowless shed called the Garden of Light. Inside was a “contemporary courtyard garden”, designed by two newcomers, Torunn Saksvikrønning and Jonathan Gittins. What set this courtyard apart from its contemporaries, however, was that it was expressly designed to be enjoyed at night.
To achieve that, the plot was painted with LED (light-emitting diode) lighting, an energy-efficient, unobtrusive and softly ambient form of illumination that took the garden through moods indigo, fiery and frosty in imitation of the shifting spectrum of the aurora borealis. Hence the need for the shed that kept the interior in a state of 24-hour midnight, discovered only on entering or by peering through slits in its sides.
But what struck many visitors about the Garden of Light is how beguilingly it would have played its nocturne even without the LEDs, which, after all, might be a trifle LSD for some tastes. And that came down to the planting. In a space half the size of a two-up-two-down backyard, Gittins and Saksvikrønning had assembled all the necessary ingredients for the perfect twilight garden, plants whose intricate play of form and luminous tones would have mutated and grown more magical as night fell whether lit by diode or candle or just left darkling.
So how to imitate it, indeed enlarge on it? How to turn the garden at dusk into a place that develops a character and mystique entirely its own? Well there is lighting, of course, and what kind and whether it’s necessary (not strictly — in fact, for me, hardly at all). Then there are certain “hard” elements and other atmospherics: pale gravel and stones, for example, acquire a transforming glow at evening, while newly wetted paving (indeed, newly wetted everything) is a gleaming way of stating that the day is over and now the show begins. But the key to creating a garden of night is plants, and there are two main strands to crepuscular planting.
The first is what I call the Taj Mahal principle, namely that white or at least very pale things wax enchanting in the gloaming and even more so by moonlight. Now this is by no means hard and fast: try watching, for example, the scarlet of Lobelia cardinalis or Crocosmia ‘Spitfire’ as it deepens and dwindles in the dusk, departing magically in a will-o’-the-wisp of petrol blue. But for the Garden of Light at Hampton Court the Taj Mahal principle was firmly in place, and that meant majoring in white-flowered Agapanthus (such as ‘Bressingham White’ and ‘Snowy Owl’) and foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea f. albiflora) with a single, central Betula pendula. For the rest of us it extends to almost any white-flowered plant that performs in summer when we are most likely to want to be outside — spires of delphiniums, nosegays of mock orange (both Philadelphus and Pittosporum tobira), fringes of lacy pinks like Dianthus ‘Mrs Sinkins’, the ivory towers of Yucca filamentosa, a rambling rose such as ‘Félicité et Perpétue’ or ‘Climbing Iceberg’ — these and countless other albinos will make a phosphorescent fantasy of the garden at dusk.
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There is, however, a trio of ghostly romantics that deserves special mention. Such is their impact that these are the plants to choose if you are pushed for space, or want to confine your twilit garden to a few planters, around an alfresco table for example. The calla lily Zantedeschia aethiopica ‘Crowborough’ is a hardy perennial often sold as a marginal aquatic but ideal for large pots where it can feast on damp rich soil. Its bold arrowhead leaves shimmer in fading light, while its spectral spathes transport you to another place entirely — a Mogul courtyard, perhaps, or the Mexican festivals painted by Diego Rivera. Similarly transporting is angel’s trumpets, Brugmansia x candida and its varieties. Massive, marmoreal and hanging heavy with nocturnal scent, its phantom-like flowers are so hypnotic by night that some Amazonian tribes consider them sacred spirits. Brugmansia is usually sold as a conservatory shrub, but it will do perfectly well in a pot on a sheltered terrace between May and October. Then just bring it in to a cool, frost-free place and keep it on the dry side for the winter. Finally there is Lilium regale, slim-leaved, blush-bloomed and with a perfume capable of consigning the worst of days to oblivion. Plant three to five bulbs to a large pot next spring for display around the patio come summer. Next autumn, knock them out and plant the whole rootball in a border where they will continue the Woman in White motif and flourish without fuss, quite possibly for another century.
Flowers are not the only way of catching a moonbeam. Variegated foliage becomes radiant with the dying of the light. Again, look for whites and ivories: in my garden we use stripey-leaved bamboos such as X Hibanobambusa tranquillans ‘Shiroshima’ and the smaller Pleioblastus ‘Tsuboi’, cream-edged hostas, and two evergreen perennials that are ideal for somewhat enclosed and favoured spots — Iris japonica ‘Variegata’ with cadmium-streaked ground-smothering fans, and Farfugium japonicum ‘Argenteum’, its long-stalked dish-like leaves splashed with brilliant white. You could throw all of these, and other variegated plants, together, producing what in the near-dark would resemble a garden pictured in negative. But I prefer to use them strategically, alongside heavier and darker leaved plants or in gloomy patches, to paint with stolen light and to reinforce the idea (or illusion) that the garden possesses that most precious of all nocturnal qualities — depth.
Fading light, most obviously, masks a garden’s blemishes; but it does rather more than that — it reinvents the garden, restoring promise to the overblown, investing the familiar with mystery, making stars of matinée bit-part players, and revealing a new palette and structure within a matter of minutes. It is the natural element of shifting submarine colours and enigmatic presences, and some foliage plants are especially susceptible to its tenebrous charms. Among them look out for the solemn sentries of fastigiate shrubs (narrowly columnar forms of yew, cypress, Berberis and Ilex crenata), for bamboos such as Phyllostachys with clear, glossy stems and flickering canopies, for tree ferns, the palm Trachycarpus fortunei and Fatsia japonica, all three spectacular in silhouette, for streaming or shaggy grasses and sedges such as Hakonechloa macra and Carex flagellifera, and the lustrous interleaved blades of the non-variegated Hosta lancifolia. As dusk defamiliarises them, plants like these create an alien but alluring habitat of their own, a lost domain that one longs to enter.