His favourite white rambler is Rosa ‘Paul’s Lemon Pillar’, a climbing rose with large, highly fragrant creamy flowers that grows strongly to around 25ft. It has highly flexible branches that hang down gracefully with small, dainty, double rosette-like flowers in large open sprays. As with many ramblers it has one long, glorious flush of flowers. A very different rose but a favourite of Nicky’s is the wild ‘Dog Rose’. This, he says, “is the unofficial Rose of England”. This pretty, delicate-looking flower has a cast-iron constitution and scrambles through hedgerows using other plants to climb up to reach the light. It flowers once, but the hips that follow are vibrant in colour.
Breaking away from whites, lavenders are also key Nicky plants, as well as mauve tobacco plants, lime zinnias, white and bronze chrysanthemums, and pale pink dahlias.
Similarly, when it comes to painting outside woodwork such as doors, windows and furniture, one of his favourite colours is a sort of pale rain cloud colour with a touch of mauve in it: a colour you often see on the shutters and windows in the south of France.
Nicky is wary of yellow outside, both on hard elements and for flowers.