Marvellous night for a moondance: Get a garden that looks well by night

Want a garden that looks well by night? Fiann Ó Nualláin shows you how to make that dream come true.

SINCE I began writing full-time, a few years now, I have developed an even more special relationship with my garden.

It once was a workplace or at least a workshop for my design ideas and my aspirations to be sustainable but always a chore of sorts, all action and the bulk of my day spent in it.

Now that it is not so daily, when I can escape the backroom and the keyboard, I find my garden’s arms open and its soft soothing whispers uplifting and comforting. It is a break from the ever-hungry page, solace from pains of research and a refuge from the intensity of thoughts.

Its needs are no longer a chore but a beautiful participation with the life of nature and the nature of life — a dance we share.

I always loved gardening but now it’s almost a love affair. And I don’t care who knows it.

Let the sticks and stones miss. We need more love affairs with the natural world or it won’t be long before there is no natural world left — or no humanity for that matter.

I don’t just mean climate change; I mean how we humans inhabit this world and indeed live with ourselves.

Are we still to be natural beings in a world where the most real people get is when they are virtual? How will we aspire when the only awe is manufactured?

Maybe the low light is kicking in early but it makes me want to cry when I witness the disconnect — when all I see is a sea of phone-struck automatons.

I think go climb a tree, go swim a lake, go smell a rose — it’s more enlivening than the branded coffee.

Come on, I think, go get awestruck — for your own sake — and with all my heart and lungs I want to shout it out but I hold back, preferring my jackets to button up the front.

Then I let the garden caress my brow, hold my hand, make it all okay. Now, there are days where I don’t get to take a breath of air with her until midnight but it is the first real breath of the day and it got me thinking about the garden as an invaluable night space. Safe, attainable, rewarding.

All those TV makeover shows over the past few decades have framed the garden as an outdoor room, as an extension of the house, but why enjoy the garden only for half of the day? why not have it so that it also shines at night?

So yes, you can put up some lights around your seating area, maybe get a fire pit or even an outdoor oven and voilà, you can sup and sip and relax your evenings away with all the comfort of that outdoor room.

I’m not a fan of what I term “dollshousing” — you know, moving the furniture and changing the cushions every few months — be that indoors or outdoors.

I like enduring, not fad and that way I feel there’s less harm to the planet.

So, in that vein, my night garden is actually a garden designed/modified to benefit from the night — to look and preform as well under the glimmer of the moon as it does under the glare of the sun.

Like the idea? It’s so easy to achieve.

It is all about maximising that moon, giving it reflective surfaces to bounce off.

Some of those surfaces are hard but a lot of the subtle changes that I have eased in are night bloomers and silver foliage plants that just glow on certain nights and retain good visibility even if cloud cover is on the obscuring arc.

In terms of hard surfaces, the biggest outlay was a top dressing of lighter gravel over my once-dark shale paths. Good footing is essential in night-time use.

A few dotted solars help but you won’t be keeping the neighbours awake. I prefer subtly so taking my inspiration from all those zen poems about the moon in a pond, I have added a few extra reflective surfaces.

Beyond the shining path (no Marxist puns intended) and a pond, you can add a polished top table, some silver spheres or even just think white, off-whites, pale blue and silver paint to trellis, supports or posts.

Not so much that it would be garish or snow-blinding in daytime but enough to catch and bounce the moonbeams or the candle lights or the solar uplighter and give feature to the darkness. The less artificial lights the better. What you want is to bathe in the moon.

To experience the natural beauty of the night birch (Betula spp) would make a brilliant but gentle beacon.

Or perhaps a silver leaved tree such a Pyrus salicifolia, ‘Pendula’ (ornamental pear), a silver spruce (Picea spp) or silver fir (Abies alba). On a smaller scale how about a specimen or hedge of Pittosporum tenuifolium.

Within your borders or containers, you can dot some pale foliage plants as reflective highlighters, gems such as the silvery leaved Brunnera macrophylla or Stachys byzantina — both glimmer by night and look good by day too.

The day garden will not lose any magic by these tweaks, but your evenings will definitely gain and the night will shine.

Even if by day your garden’s theme is on the Mediterranean side you can can swap in some Russian sage (Perovskia spp), lavender, silver thyme, Rose campion (Lychnis coronaria ) with its bright magenta-pink flowers and stunning silver stems and keep the best of both worlds.

Think of the drama of eryngium (sea hollies) and the silvery blue shimmer of Festuca glauca as eye-catching by night as my day — but I might say a touch more breath-taking by night.

Think drifts of sweet alyssum (Lobularia maritima) or candytuft (Iberis sempervirens) or go bold with hostas and Athyrium niponicum pictum (the Japanese painted fern).

Include plans for white bleeding hearts (Dicentra spectabilis ‘Alba’), some ornamental oxeye (Leucanthemum × superbum), Echinacea purpurea “White Swan”, or the “Whirling Butterflies” of Gaura lindheimeri.

I am a fan of fragrance, I think a garden without scent is like a night sky without stars and while white regal lilies (Lilium regale), lily of the valley (Convallaria majalis) and Phlox paniculata will bring heady perfume by day and night.

There plants that only or more intensely emit evening and night fragrance — think night gladiolus, jasmine, evening primrose (Oenothera spp), night-scented stock and the Nottingham catchfly (Silene nutans).

Even the veg patch can participate in the moondance — cardoon and globe artichoke are gourmet/heritage edibles but their silver foliage adds great structure to the moonlit garden.

We are moving into winter, the nights are drawing in, why lose the use of an asset for want of a little ingenuity and a quick trip to the garden centre.