Perfect Planting Suggestions

FRIENDLY FACES
It is very much easier to love plants (and people) if they show some sign of loving s_.-OU in return. To get violas on your side, give them heavy, damp ground. You may find that they grow better in half shade than they do in sun. All the violas have five petals, two making rounded ears at the top, two making cheeks at the sides and one pouting into a chin at the bottom, but the way that the petals are put together gives each variety a completely different character. Some are moon-faced, the petals running together into a gentle rounded shape. Others have narrower petals that make long rather peaky faces, as with the superb `Ardross Gem'.

This viola spreads out a low mat of foliage before raising its flowers well above the leaves on wiry 18cm (7in) stems. This gives quite a different effect from the violas that like to have their leaves about them when they flower and pull their foliage up around their necks like shawls. Try `Ardross Gerd with a silver-leaved mossy saxifrage and a dwarf pink geranium, such as G. sanguineum var. striatum. It will grow well in a pot, though not quite as luxuriantly as it does in open ground. The mat of leaves spreads to cover the soil and stops it drying out and the flowers bob about in the space completely different flowering season. They can, for instance, usefully disguise the collapsing foliage of colchicums, which are looking at their worst by late spring. But the colchicums' time will come just when you shear back the violas for

The fact that 1,1311 can never quite describe the exact color of any particular violais an advantage. Their smudgy colors, like chameleons' skins, adapt to whatever company they find themselves in.

If slugs ate bindweed, it would be much easier to believe that we are indeed part of some Grand Design. change their character completely when combined with the warmer shades of verbenas. Maggie Mott lived at a house called Scotswood in Sunningdale. Berkshire, where her family had a gardener who was a viola fancier. He named a seedling after his employer's daughter and showed it successfully at the Royal Horticultural Society It appeared in the Society's viola trials in 1904 and has been in cultivation ever since.

It flourished in India in the 1930s when the garden designer John Codrington used it in the gardens of the Residency in Delhi. The Commander in Chief, Sir Phillip Chet wode, had grandiose ideas for a large circular pool at the end of a vista there. The pool proved too expensive a project so Codrington planted a huge circle of 'Maggie Mott' instead, the silvery color giving the illusion from the Residency windows that there really was water at the end of the view.