My plans, it turned out, were naïve. My small, thin box of a garden was to have a simple palette of dark-green bones with occasional flashes of white. The ‘bones’ were yew, ivy and hornbeam. The white flashes were to be Arnmi majus, cosmos and roses. I ordered an avalanche of snow-white brunnera, some climbing roses and a pair of white Paeonia rockii from a trusted specialist, and waited.
My careful plans started to unravel as soon as some of those white brunnera turned out to be blue and the roses sported distinctly yellow buds
