Playful ideas spring from British plantings

I brought home a gnome from my vacation. Just a cheerful little one holding a ''Welcome" sign.

This could be a dangerous beginning, because none of the gardens I saw in England had just one gnome. There was either a sizable population or none at all.

Britain has many people who take their gardening seriously, but that's not how they view their gardens. If you can't lighten up in your backyard, after all, where can you? So there's a middle-class tradition in England of decorating plant-filled yards with ceramic and plastic gnomes, hedgehogs, badgers, and field mice, often in costumes straight out of ''The Wind in the Willows." Some private gardens even sport entire mini-villages of tiny Tudor cottages set among dwarf plantings, kind of like miniature railroads without the trains.

I find it charming. And it's certainly one way to make a small backyard look bigger. I don't know if Boston gardens are ready for that degree of eccentricity, but it's an idea.

Any tour of English gardens, like the self-guided one I just returned from, does leave you full of new ideas to try at home. But it can be tricky. A lot of things that work fine there won't work here at all.

I think about half the flowering plants I saw growing so lushly in the south and west of England (and two-thirds of the roses) would not make it through a New England winter. In addition to simply being colder here, most of our gardens suffer from poorly draining clay soil so that water freezes around roots, depriving them of necessary tiny air pockets, so they get to freeze and suffocate. Our hot, dry summers are an added insult. While Great Britain is actually as far north as Newfoundland, its island climate is greatly moderated by the Gulf Stream, so most southern English gardens enjoy temperatures that usually stay between 25 and 80 degrees, while plants in southern New England have to survive annual swings from about 5 to 95.

It can be frustrating to admire so many plants you cannot grow. When friendly local people in Dorchester (the original one in Dorset, England) asked me where Boston is located, I found myself replying tersely: ''Near Canada." I could have added, ''Ha! You folks don't know the meaning of the word winter!" but did not. However, like any plantaholic, I returned with a list of flowers I saw that I'm newly excited about. The strange thing is that I'm already growing many of them.

Because of my deep distrust of the New England suitability of plants flourishing in gorgeous English gardens, I paid particular attention to those that I know from experience will do well here. What I hadn't previously realized was their design potential. For instance, consider the white wood aster (Aster divaricatus). This is a wild American plant with dark, wiry stems and tiny, white autumn flowers that happens to be the only aster that thrives in shade. It grows wild in my yard, and I had considered it a weed. But now that I've seen it carefully tended in the famous White Garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, my attitude toward it has changed totally.

The plant of the hour in England is red astrantia. I know it grows easily here because I've long cultivated the usual unassuming white variety for its papery everlasting blooms. But Dutch nurseryman Piet Oudolf (pronounced Pete Ow-dolf), who specializes in tough but underused plants, elevated it to star status, enlisting a grower to raise more than 6,000 seedlings in the pursuit of better deep-dark-red versions. Thus a horticultural duckling became a swan.

Another old plant that has become a new star is knautia macedonia, with flowers of a similar intense claret color. I've been growing this one, too, ever since it was recommended by a staff member on WGBH-TV's ''Victory Garden" as one of the only perennials that will bloom all season (as long as you pick off the spent blossoms). But I tucked it away in a corner because it flops, and I can't be bothered staking small plants. Now I've found the solution in England, where it's commonly planted among all those stout red astrantias whose stiff stems support the weak kneed knautia nicely, creating the illusion of a single perennial covered with never-ending red flowers.

I've also gained new respect for catmint (nepeta). This also lacks backbone, but English gardeners plant it in front of borders where it flops over paths most fetchingly. Like its less hardy cousin catnip, catmint attracts felines, but it doesn't seem damaged by a brief roll or two. With its blue-gray aromatic foliage and flower spikes, it makes an easy substitute for those classic lavender hedges that are so hard to grow here. Look for the variety Superba.

Catmint is a great all-purpose companion plant, but lady's mantle (alchemilla) is even better. This plant deserves a Best Supporting Oscar for the way its frothy chartreuse blooms make any red or blue flowers planted nearby pop with vibrancy. While catmint needs sun and good drainage, lady's mantle self-seeds happily in damp or dry sites in sun or shade. In other words, anywhere. Yet it's used much more in England than here.

Dahlias have enjoyed a huge comeback both in the United States and Britain, but the big thing now is to grow varieties with red or purple leaves. The best new example I saw at the Royal Horticultural Gardens at Wisley is called Moonfire, which produces large golden daisies with red centers growing on very dark leaves. Already one of the best-selling dahlias in England, it should be available from mail-order houses here next spring.

The most interesting garden I saw was an immense new border designed by Oudolf at Wisley in the naturalistic movement style that he has pioneered along with Washington, D.C.-based design partners Wolfgang Oehme and James Van Sweden. Oudolf's immense swaths of giant-sized perennials and ornamental grasses cover almost 2 acres of Surrey hillside and are meant to be viewed from afar as ribbons of contrasting textures in muted tones of russet, crimson, and purple that have interest year round.

Oudolf searches out, tests, and selects low-maintenance plants that require no pesticides or fertilizers. Many are native wildflowers such as Joe Pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum), amsonia, and Virginia speedwell (Veronicastrum virginicum), which have just begun appearing in American gardens, including my own. They are all magnets for birds and butterflies. His bulb of choice is globe alliums, which are very much in style in Britain now. The long-blooming purple spheres of the stately 3-foot-tall Globemaster and its low-growing parent plant A. chrisophii are left standing to gradually dry into tawny punctuation marks in gardens throughout England.

Oudolf's garden left me wanting to experiment with more plants from his environmentally friendly palette, including baptisia, Salvia nemorosa, Persicaria polymorpha, and the many new mildew-resistant monardas. His book ''Dream Plants for the Natural Garden," written with Henk Gerritsen, is an encyclopedia of his favorite low-maintenance plants. Digging Dog Nursery (diggingdog.com; 707-937-1130, catalog $5) is a good source for some of the unusual ones.

British garden design has long focused on displaying new and interesting plant material in traditional settings. So the substantial inroads that good, modern, outdoor sculpture has made in many landscapes lately is surprising. Sir Harold Hillier Gardens in Hampshire features much well-chosen abstract art along the 180 acres of paths winding through its collection of 12,000 varieties of rare hardy trees and shrubs.

But that gnomish element of whimsy often surfaces even in modern art once it gets to play outside in the garden. At Arlington Court, a National Trust property near Barnstable in Devon, a double row of impressionistic welded metal schoolchildren, featureless except for their school caps and gaping mouths, march tentatively through the tall grass in what appears to be a school outing that is both thrilling and daunting.

In the 10-acre sculpture garden of the nearby Broomhill Art Hotel, a combination gallery and bed-and-breakfast, installations also refer to their surroundings in a humorous and mischievous way. Glowering terra cotta gargoyles and polyresin flowers lurk along the steep garden paths. A handsome, crafted, overstuffed sofa made of cemented ceramic parts, complete with a snoozing ceramic cat, parodies the stereotypical garden bench, and is comfortable to sit on, too. Polyresin lovers clinch on another bench while a circle of hooded blue Druids add mystery to a nearby clearing. Stands of tall ceramic columns and colorfully patterned poles mimic the surrounding tree trunks. Nothing is quite as it first appears. A very flat green lawn surrounded by sculptures turns out to be a pond with a solid cover of duckweed.

This rather gothic garden climaxes in a truly spooky group of giant warriors and a 20-foot-tall winged griffin braying over a fallen body. Into this menacing assemblage strolls a very contemporary bride and groom who pose for wedding photos, kissing daintily for the cameras amid the weird carnage. Some people just really know how to enjoy a garden.