Garden Advice from Marcus Bergin

Shade has an unfortunate reputation. It's often spoken about as though it's a problem waiting to be solved. People apologise for it when I visit their gardens. "Nothing seems to grow there." "It's too dark." "I don't know what to plant beneath the trees." I understand why. Garden centres and gardening programmes tend to celebrate bright, colourful borders full of sunshine-loving plants. It's easy to come away thinking that a successful garden needs six hours of sunshine every

One of the questions I ask almost every new client is a surprisingly simple one. "How much sun does this border get?" The answer is often immediate. "It's a sunny border." Or perhaps, "It's mostly shade." The interesting thing is that, after spending a little time in the garden, those descriptions often turn out to be only partly true. Very few gardens fit neatly into the categories we tend to use. Most contain a fascinating mixture of light and shade that changes not only th