Just add water…

A milestone day in the project – we’ve started filling the pool with water. Already I can see we made the right decision with the tiles. They are a totally different colour wet: a really saturated teal-y turquoise instead of the chalky baby-blue of them dry. They’re a natural stone and have been a little trickier to work with than the glass mosaics you would usually see in a pool like this, but I think the colour and texture will look so much better in the garden. It’s effectively a huge water feature so we wanted it to enhance the planting rather than detract from it, and the Bali-vibe will add to the lush, vibrant effect we’re going for.

The border down the side of the pool is shaping up to be pretty stunning. The standout shrubs are four Hydrangea ‘Incrediball’ which produce giant mop-head flowers on teetering stems that bloom first in bright lime, mature to white and then fade back to a softer green. Unfortunately the geums (‘Mrs Bradshaw’) went in just after flowering so we’ll have to wait until next year to see the teal/neon red colour clash of them against the pool. But the fiery orange spikes of crocosmia (‘Lucifer’) are giving us a taste of what’s to come and the border already looks well-established thanks to the box and pittosporum balls dotted up and down it. Providing a striped backdrop behind these is the dark yew hedge, the black fence and then the bright green ‘high hedge’ of beech trees, trained into cubes. The straight lines of these will follow the edge of the pool and provide a foil for the wilder plants in front. Conflictingly, I love parallel lines almost as much as I love the overrun, untamed look. Teal and orange, lush and linear. The pool area is all about contrast.