How to plant a beautiful herbaceous border - your complete guide

Do you find yourself spending a lot of money on plants and then you get them home and somehow the shapes and the sizes and the heights and the colors just aren't quite right for your border? It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and this video brings together the best expert advice we've had on creating an amazing perennial border. We've got some brilliant advice on choosing the best perennial plants, we've got some lovely border ideas and also some excellent tips on how to keep the costs down. But first, what is a perennial border and is it the same as a herbaceous border? Yes, those two terms are used pretty interchangeably but technically a perennial is any plant that stays in your garden for three years or more, while a herbaceous plant has no woody stems, so a perennial plant includes shrubs, herbaceous plants technically doesn't. Now before you actually buy any plants, all the experts say that it's a really good idea to know what you want and preferably to make a list, so the first video we'll go to is Steve Edney and Lou Dowell who have created an amazing hundred foot perennial border from scratch and when this video was shot it was only two years old. Thinking about how you select plants, if you think here we are going to the garden center or to the nursery or to the plant fair, so how would you suggest people start thinking? The first thing to think about when choosing plants for a site is the site itself, we always work from the soil upwards, so I know it's a bit boring and you hear it a lot but you have to know your soil and if you know your soil what kind of soil you have, whether it's sandy or silty or very clay, does it have standing water in the winter, does it get perishingly dry in the summer, those are important considerations before you make a plant choice. Once you understand your soil and your local climate, so for us we're here in East Kent so we have some of the highest sunshine hours anywhere in the country, we have some of the lowest rainfall anywhere in the country, so plant choices are dictated quite a lot by our climate. When we were first designing our border we thought about where the roses and where the shrubs and where the evergreen perennials were all going first before the rest of the planting was stitched in around those groups and so for instance this wonderful aryngium here which is yucca folium, chosen because of its drought tolerance but also because it's incredibly architectural, not just with these wonderful seed heads, I mean they're magic while they're in flower, they're magic once they turn into seed heads, but also while the plant is building it's almost semi-evergreen so yucca folium as in it's yucca like, like the succulent plants, so it has a really good rosette, a really good crown of foliage as it's emerging in the spring, so all through the season the interest is there and it builds slowly until it reaches the final point when it produces a wonderful seed head and surprisingly drought tolerant and actually surprisingly stable for such a tall perennial which is at about about 1.5 meters so it's quite a large stately perennial but don't let that put you off if you've got a smaller garden because the flower might be at 1.5 meters but the foliage is only at about 80 centimeters or 90 centimeters so light can still filter through if you have other plants around it like you have here at the front you have a potentilla, this is Miss Wilmot, I love the opposition between what is effectively such a such a tasteful wonderful sort of creamy yellow flower from the eryngium with that quite gaudy hot pink from the potentilla and this has been in flower for months, our front edges are very important to us to have really long flowering plants and the potentilla also has a very different leaf shape so that the texture between the different leaf types is really pronounced in the spring as the plants are developing and growing so that there's there's real drama between the plants even when they're out of flower and then rising above it to the back with the wonderful steeper giganteum cline fontaine and so this little combination is one of them that's working really well and and then just down to the to the right hand side here is a hylotelephium or what people knew as sedum this one is called matrona now this is a tried and tested we've grown this a lot in many projects and many planting combinations which we think is wonderful it is a bee magnet there's a geranium knitting in as well very nicely called dillis between the eryngium and the steeper now we don't like to have any bare earth nature doesn't like bare earth it will always colonize the ground with weeds and that's a modern construct isn't it the word weed this idea that it's a plant that we don't want and so we call it a weed could be a wonderful perennial like verbena bonariensis for instance often is a bit weedy for us because it seeds around in places we don't want it so we dig it up where we don't want it and we don't always get it right but here i think we've really got it we've got it spot on there's even a little punctuating verona castrum here at the front so when we're thinking about to combine them we're thinking about their flowering seasons we're thinking about their attraction to wildlife we're thinking about seed heads we're thinking about their flowering length of flowering period so verbena bampton here at the front wonderful purple foliage wonderful purple flowers an incredibly long flowering period but all in the latter part of the summer so in the spring it's quite slow to get going but actually we don't mind that at all because we want high and late summer interest from this border and these provide it in abundance and they're all working together without trying to control each other we like to think of any of our beds and borders as like a really slow fireworks display so you've just got plants which punch up through other plants and they explode into flower and then they might go over into seed heads if we don't like the seed head we might cut it out to keep the border looking fresh if we think the seed head is attractive we we leave it and allow it to be part of the combination later on but what you don't want and what people often find is that their borders they've picked plants that are all the same height so there's no drama within the border everyone is obsessed with flowers if you talk to any really good gardener flowers are not quite the afterthought but they're not the primary consideration you're thinking about the height of a plant you're thinking about its foliage you're thinking about the other three seasons of interest that that plant might provide for you other than its season of flowering color doesn't just mean flower it color comes from every aspect of the plant but we we hone in as gardeners on flowers because often that's the moment as well when insects butterflies moths bees and we tend to focus in just at that flowering moment because there's often a real hum of activity around a plant but it shouldn't be your primary consideration alone and the grasses of course add real drama because of their uh because of the movement so so don't be afraid to plant grasses that are significantly larger perhaps than some of your other plants around it proportionally wise you wouldn't want anything to be a third bigger than the plant next to it maybe 50 percent unless you've made a conscious choice to do that but grasses don't be afraid to use very tall grasses because often their foliage is very low and it's their seed heads which are incredibly high and they're often so light and whimsical that they their movement is incredibly important in a border and you see straight through them as well so it's not like it has a blocking effect so you can effectively use grasses almost anywhere in a border when it comes to grasses i would say again this rule of three never use more than a third of grass in your in your borders otherwise suddenly in the summer you'll feel it's perhaps a little flat and you'll think oh why isn't there enough flower you know i was i was hoping for a bit more going on the grasses are wonderful but i'd like a bit more flower and interest uh from from the color now obviously the big professional gardens can achieve things that we simply can't they've got more space they've got more resources they've got more expertise but there are lessons from those big professional gardens that are very transferable to our smaller gardens and one of the best interviews we've ever had here on the middle size garden has been tom brown who's head gardener at west dean gardens and he has got some really useful garden border ideas and tips so tom what's your starting point for creating a border i've been fortunate enough to sort of look at different types of borders at different stages in my career i suppose i've had some situations where i've had a complete blank canvas an empty bed or i've had a situation where i've got an established border that i need to embellish or enhance but the process is pretty much the same so i pick a theme or a color palette that i want to work with or work with the existing color palette and identify my tall plants medium-sized plants and the short plants and also accent plants that fit within that theme or that color palette so i've got sort of four lists on a piece of paper then start to boil that down and i would say trying to boil that down into probably a lot fewer than you're comfortable with to begin with but ultimately you end up with a real cracking list once you've got that short list and you've got your piece of paper you start to think right i need some height and i need some repetition in here so in the border where they're in at the moment we've got the cardoons the sinaras that are our accent plants at the back of the board of the tall plants if you like and they're repeated so they bounce from left to right as you go down the border because rhythm and repetition are absolutely key and you think that rhythm and repetition are going to be the factors that decipher a good border and a great border so often less is more in terms of planting and in terms of the message that you're trying to get get across so put those big structural plants at the back and make sure they bounce and rhythm all the way down the border and then start to bring in some of those medium-sized plants so it might be phlox paniculata or asters those sort of cushioned plants that are going to give you lots of flower at a particular time and then start looking at the front of your border so it might be the salvia nemorosa or the germanic irises that you start to put in and when you're putting all these different components together be aware of contrast so whether it's rounded foliages or sword foliage upright or spiked flowers like foxgloves or rounded daisy-like flowers like peonies for example try and put contrasting plants next to each other so contrasting foliage contrasting flowers because if you've got two plants that look the same it's very difficult for them to get your attention as you walk past whereas if you've got a right upright foxglove and a nice rounded hummock of salvia then they sort of complement each other in a contrastingly strange strange way. And so apart from colours is there any other kind of theme or idea that you might go for when you're planning a border? Yeah the principles are pretty pretty universal about putting plants together and it could be subtropical planting it could be more of an arid sort of alpine style again it's all about working with heights and accents and and rhythm and repetition in that because you want your eyes to work a bit harder than your feet when you come to a border so if you come into a garden and let's say for example iris jane phillips the lovely blue germanic iris that's one of my favorites if you walk into an enclosed space and if you've got iris jane phillips flowering in four or five different spots in that garden you walk in and your eye is instantly drawn and bounces around the garden before you've even taken a step and it feels much more cohesive and natural that way as well so I think whether you're working with irises or you're working with banana palms the principle is the same. And what percentage of a border do you think needs to be either perennials or annuals or evergreens I mean is there a formula was it just instinct? Over the years I've come to the conclusion that the majority of the planting should be permanent and so I would say about 80 percent and the reason I say that is because a lot of us are a time poor we haven't got a huge amount of time to spend in our gardens and also the cost of sort of replacing these annuals too so with me I tend to have about 80 percent of permanent planting but then I have a cast of annuals that I will grow and pop into those borders and to give me the fireworks and that lift because when we visit gardens quite often we'll go away saying oh do you remember the aliens or do you remember those lovely tulips you want to have a memorable element in the border and if you can achieve that throughout the seasons that's I think urging on a very successful border if you can do that. And is there a rule as to how many varieties of plants you can have in a border to keep it looking lush but not messy? Sort of I would say again less is more and I think I would rather have bigger clumps of fewer plants than smaller clumps of lots of different different plants and I always like in a border can be quite a hostile place for plants you know it's survival of the fittest in a lot of ways so if you can plant things in drifts let's say a groups of seven nine eleven you've got quite a nice substantial clump and that clump is big enough that if on the edges of that clump they're fighting and battling with their neighbours and you lose a couple from the edge you've still got that really strong core that's delivering that particular quality from the flower that that you want so when you're working with these sorts of borders you do find that some plants just aren't don't cut the mustard and they do tend to disappear and it might be if they look weaker and aren't happy then move them into another part of the garden because this particular border is a bit like a rough school playground you know but where I've got cardoons in this border and I've got oryngiums that like the space they like the open aspect a couple of the cardoons have lent forward so the oryngiums at the very front of the clump are doing quite well but the ones further back are being out competed by the cardoon so this autumn I'll lift those and either move those clear of the cardoon or move them to another part of the garden. There's been quite a lot of questions from the YouTube viewers and quite a few people have asked questions along the lines of what plants sort of mingle together without looking messy. There's this war that you speak of was a playground jostling in this border and really how you how you sort that out and how you prevent it from just turning into chaos. So when I form a clump of a plant I think of a tadpole shape so I have the main body of the clump and then the tail will often then disappear off into the back or will then dovetail into another tadpole that's got the large clump there. Editing is very important so when you've got borders in August I often think it's a good time of year to review what's happened because in August everything's at its maximum capacity so you can see how much something's spread but with this sort of thuggish environment you do get the bullies in the border and quite often I'll go through with a notepad and it can be quite civilized with a gin and tonic at the end of the day and actually write down and take pictures of that particular aster that's trebled in size over the last sort of four or five months and then make a note to say in the autumn or the spring reduce that back by 50 percent so you're trying to address that balance every autumn or spring but you're making those notes and making those photos in the August so you're doing it well in advance because I guarantee you when it comes to the autumn or the spring you think now where was that aster where how far did it go out you do have to be the puppet master you do have to have that moment where you just go in there blow the playground whistle and get everybody organized again. Can you recommend some good sort of successions of plants? Sure I mean with the perennial side of things you've got your the sort of the backbone of the border that should be there all the time but then I often use a cast of of contenders that I want to be more firework like in their in their what they deliver in a border and again it's that memorable thing that people can take away so I would start the season sort of January time by sowing things like scabius atropurperia, daucus carota the wild carrot, amimagus, verbena benariensis and just have sort of 20 of those that I'm growing from seed so they don't have to be too expensive but they're coming along from January because they're hardy annual so you can start them quite early and they'd be looking to go into the border about end of March when you've done all your mulching and cutting down and that's all ready to go. You then look at tulips April May time so your tulips would be your first big performance they would then start to die down and I said look at alliums as a succession from that and you can get some really big dramatic alliums and again planting them in in groups of 10-15 throughout your planting some at the back of the border some at the front because at that time of year we haven't got the very big plants that are starting to fight for space at the back once your alliums are done that's when your scabius and your daucus will then start to flower and give you that early summer color sort of through until July August time and then I'm a big fan of gladioli I think people often see them as quite old-fashioned but there's a wonderful selection of miniature gladioli that are available to us gardeners now they don't need staking and you can put them towards the front of the border and they almost act like a summer tulip so they'll give you that rocket of color and again then they're not going to break the bank if you order a few bulbs and they'll give you that flower power right the way through until sort of September October time and that's when the daisy family really come in so things like the rudbeckias the solidagos the helleniums make sure you and the asters make sure you've got some of those in your border because they will pick up the baton when a lot of other plants are sort of taking a deep breath because they're exhausted from the summer the daisy family then say right it's our turn in August September October look tremendous how deep should garden border be I always think you want to feel sort of slightly immersed in a border so if it's a very thin strip then you haven't got the ability to play with perception and that heights I would say probably looking at if you can a couple of meters two or three meters just so you've got enough enough depth so that height can sort of flow up and down as you look down the border so give yourself enough room to play I would say and two or three meters should do that so presumably you think if you've got a garden that's perhaps a bit narrow it's better to have a big border on one side rather than two slightly narrower borders on either side I've sort of got to the stage where that's sort of that 360 experience is quite interesting and if you look at a border from say the lawn and you've got your border and then the fence you're very much a spectator of what's happening if you've got a narrow border a narrow garden excuse me and you can create a winding path that sort of meanders left to right you've then got that ability to create a wider border on one side and a slightly narrow border that you can echo the planting on the other and then it flips back and reverses so with a very narrow garden you can create that depth by sacrificing the depth on the other side so when you're walking through a border if you can feel slightly immersed I think it just goes up a notch what you take away from it now we'll come to the sort of practical aspects of of actually planting and choosing a border and one of the things that I'm quite curious about is you know how do you personally actually plant plants do you dig the hole exactly the size of the root or do you dig it you know the size of the root plus a half which I think is what's usually recommended and do you water the plants before after or both definitely advocate people watering their plants before they go in an old boss of mine said you never get that opportunity to saturate the root ball again once it's in the ground so with if you're buying plants get a small bucket particularly in warm weather and drop the plant into the bucket of water until the air bubbles stop coming up you know then that that root ball is totally saturated and it almost gives it a really good start because then trying to put water back into the center of that root ball is almost impossible once you've covered it with soil I like to plant smaller plants and more of them because I find that it gives me more freedom when it comes to creating those drifts if you've got three plants it's very difficult to come away from creating a triangle whereas if you've got seven smaller plants you can really start to get some movement with the clump and when it comes to planting I think you want to think about what those roots are going to do so if you've got a very small hole and compacted sides you put the plant in the roots are really going to struggle to penetrate out and find the establishing sort of nutrition and water that they need if you've got a trowel and you can just sort of loosen the soil up around the root ball those roots are going to be able to punch through that source so much easier and you'll find establishment is better so I dig a big enough hole to make sure that establishment is successful and when we're planting those first three weeks are critical so I'm always there with some water for the first three weeks just to make sure things are established once they're established they tend to be happier and be able to fend for themselves rather than a little bit of water one month and a little bit of water the next month because it just drags the whole process of establishment as if you can really bed them in so right you're on your own chaps and get on and do we have to stick to the spacing recommended on the label I work at about a foot spacing and again working with smaller plants if you're trying to create a clump so if we think about plants such as phlox if you can buy some nine centimeter plants what you're looking for is a clump of phlox you're not looking for three individual clumps of phlox so create your drift and your movement with the planting and they'll merge together so almost the quicker they merge together and form the kind of effect that I want the better and then with my editing and my gin and tonic I'll then look at whether I need to reduce or lift and divide in a couple of years time but initially I want that impact as soon as I can get it. How do you create natural patterns with or drifts without it looking messy? The art in gardening is picking up on those subtleties and maybe removing a stem or cutting something back to allow something to come through where you've got foxgloves that have maybe maybe seeded themselves in parts of the border and you're not quite sure if they're in the right place let them flower and if they then all of a sudden look untidy or blocking something go in there and just gently cut it back opium poppies again if you've got these seed heads and you think I don't like that there because it's blocking the geranium then just pop it out so it's those constant gentle touches which is the real art of gardening and I think when you're trying to orchestrate a border little and often just gently corralling things into a space is much better than saying right once a month I'm going to come in here and bang some heads together and sort people out it's so if you can get into that habit of just gently making sure that everything is where it should be and if something looks out of place a little trim plants recover much quicker from a little trim rather than a hack. Do you think I mean taking that you've got years of expertise and professional gardeners here as well do you think amateurs can get the full gorgeous colourful borders and if so is there any particular tips that would help an amateur gardener to achieve some of this professional look taking they're not going to do three years at horticultural college? I think it's always easier to curtail growth than it is to sort of encourage it too much so I think fertility is really the key we're asking our plants to do an awful lot in these borders so looking at mulching for example in the spring so giving it a nice layer of the amenity compost the local council compost can be incredibly rich and quite inexpensive as well if there's a way that you can cut your borders down and then put a reasonable layer of mulch on every every spring that will gently increase the fertility you'll find your plants are a lot more buoyant I used to find with with our homemade compost which is very similar to the amenity stuff that the shrubs would just take on another level of vigor so I would say if you can get that fertility into your soil every year do a nice layer of mulch you'll find after a few years that base fertility is really built up and then you've got this billowing effect that quite often you see in professional gardens. So what about staking I've had questions from people saying that their plants either flop forward or they flop over each other. Staking is one of those things that if you can get to it early it makes all the difference and everything is so much easier early in the season it's very difficult to remedy a plant that's decided to take a tumble forward without it looking completely strung up for the next month or so so I would say as the young shoots start to emerge sort of April time that's a good time to get in with your staking so whether that be bamboo canes and string whether it's birch or hazel or even the plastic or plastic coated metal rods that you can use to support perennials get in there nice and early and as long as it's done in a way that the plants will outgrow the staking so for example if we've got a nice mound of of birch the geraniums coming up through as long as the birch is at the right height that the geranium will then protrude out from the staking and it doesn't look as if it's overly trussed up then that's the way to go but go early and if you've had problems with that plant in the past go more extreme because quite often a plant will hide the staking in time and it's very difficult to then drag it back into some sort of order if it decides to take a tumble some of the plants in my border have been brilliant for 15 years others I spend a lot of money on plants and they just turn out disappointing or they disappear so to find out the best advice on choosing and placing plants in a border let's go to Rosie Hardy of the YouTube channel Rosie Hardy Gardening and whose nursery Hardy's Cottage Garden Plants has won so many awards they must have lost count how do we choose plants when we go to the garden central nursery well everybody is drawn in by the fact that there's lots of flower and lots of color now there's no problem in buying a plant that's got flower and color there but you are looking for something that is healthy so the main thing you want to look for is at the base of the plant so when you are choosing a plant yes go for the color I mean this is a fabulous orange isn't it but then you've got to look and make sure that it's got a good bottom there's nothing better than that it needs to be thick in here with good foliage it needs to have a bit of roots just appearing at the bottom of the pot here so that's not just a new plant put into a bigger pot you don't want that so something that is looking strong and healthy good amount of growth here and yes by all means get it with full flower on or if you know that you're going to a reachable place then you can go for something which hasn't flowered yet and you can get it maybe with just flower and with a good base like so which depends on what you want you want a little bit of impact straight away therefore you're going to get a lot more are you happy to let it grow and have it smaller that's the way to look at it and is there anything else we need to know when we are pushing our trolleys around yeah I mean one thing don't get sidetracked although you know the nurseries might like you to get sidetracked but the thing to remember is that you are wanting a plant to grow in the right place you've got to think about the aspect of your border to start off with so that you get the right plant so if you've got a nice sunny border say it's west facing that's one of the easiest ones to do because you've got gentle light and then you know as reasonable soil you look at what do you want to do do you want to be bright and colorful do you want it to be tonal and what are your aspirations for that border that's your starting point so you go out and look for the plants that you like that are suitable for that situation and if you like big daisies get big daisies everything is personal choice but do remember that if you fill a whole border just with big daisies it will look really quite boring yes lots of pretty round faces looking at you but it will be quite boring you've got to remember when are these plants going to flower what is their length of flowering so are you going to have flower it will be intermittently right the way through the season or are you going to have a big burst of flower and then it's off so if you have a big burst and then it stops what's going to follow on from that and these are the sort of things you've got to understand is it going to be sequential and looking at putting something that's round with something that's upright breaks up your what you're looking at so this beautiful orange will go with something like this blue here so if you were to go just for color contrast you've got really beautiful colors which will go together the other thing you've got here is you have a round flower and you have a spike flower so those contrasts you want to be thinking about you want to be thinking about leaf shape leaf texture and also using plants which are things that i call see-through plants so they've got a lovely base which means that they can be planted quite near to the front but their flowers are tall but you see through the stems so you are looking round or just looking through it so there'll be a nice blob of color at the top here a thin stem and then base so they're quite nice to put at the front this goes away from what the old adage was that you put small medium large so you get this sort of shape of them going backwards and going up high i actually like to have a bit of blousiness then a bit of soft and then a bit of height and then a bit of low and that way you get this undulation going through and it means that if something isn't tall at the beginning of the year it's tall at the end of the year and you've got to plant what you like because there is no point in going out and buying plants being told oh you've got to have that you've got to have this no it's your garden you've got to enjoy it and that's what i say to people you know really enjoy what you like other people may not like it but not everybody likes marmite so that's where you are starting from and then it's a matter of thinking how wide do these plants grow because you've got to put them together so that they don't overshadow each other you've got to remember some plants you'll buy as a small pot like this so say something around about 10 15 centimeters in size but it's going to grow to something that is 60 centimeters so you've got to give it its growing space now it won't do it in a year it won't maybe not do it in two years so what do you do in the meantime won't you fill in with annuals and it's very easy to scatter a bit of cosmos seed or nigella and just have a little bit of filler which you can then just pull out as the plants and also as those plants go over they'll smother those annuals and it won't really matter so the plants will be quite happy to grow if they've got annuals in the way but they don't want another perennial crowding in on them yeah that's correct because the annual is going to die off anyway so while they're growing they'll just go over the top of it but if you've got another perennial then they're both going to be pushing each other's space so i always say to people if you really are unsure hold your pots shoulder width apart and for most plants that is the right spacing if you then have something that's really going to get large so think of something like sinara or you know the cardoon that gets absolutely massive leaves you would need to give that a lot more space but it takes three years before it gets that big so it'd be quite nice to put in a little bit of annual stuff while it's growing and leave that space there because people get find it very very difficult to leave bare earth for something to grow into yes if you want to put in something like a biennial or two so you know you can use the odd foxglove or the odd bit of hesperus for instance they would all fit into some that sort of planting and after two years they're finished and the big plant has grown into its space know where you're going to be putting the plants know your soil type and always ask the questions you know that's the thing especially going to a nursery you've got plenty of people who are very very knowledgeable about their plants and you want to be asking those questions and saying do you think this is correct for my soil i've got heavy clay it is very very wet will this beautiful saxifrage grow there probably not so you know ask those questions for instance this beautiful gem yes it won't mind heavy clay and those are the sorts of things you want to be asking if you're going to be growing in a container no problem because you're going to be giving it what it wants you're going to be watering yourself you're going to be putting it into a compost that you've bought that's fine but in the ground it's different you need to have right plant right place so tell me how you partner plants when you're planning a border i will work out where i want my shady plants to be where i want my sunny plants to be and whether i want them to be moist and then i think about whether or not it's going to go into what sort of soil it's meant to be going in and that is how i try and partner things up to start off with then it's a matter of looking at a plant and going what type of leaf have you got are you a strappy leaf are you a big bold leaf do you have a small flower do you have a really big inflorescence and it's a matter of tying them in together so that you can have small frothy plants with something really big and bold so you get a soft and then a hard and then perhaps something soft behind that as well which is slightly taller but always tying in color so if the leaf is for instance a bronze leaf then perhaps the flower in front of it will have a bronze stem and maybe a white flower because then you get a continuity of color going through and it just will draw your eye into what you're building up with broad leaves like this of the hosta this one is a beautiful one this one is called purple heart now purple heart has got these beautiful purple markings down the stem and into the heart of the leaf that then picks up with the big leaf behind of the regercia and this bronze coloring but they're two completely different shaped large leaves and they look really good together you then have frothiness of this blue here of the phlox moving into using the light green the color of the stem of the hosta there the color of the stem of the angelica and then a big round ball at the top so all of this blends in it's quite architectural but then there's also some soft flower in there as well to soften the edges and that's really what i'm trying to explain but then also you get something like we've moved over from the angelica and this and we've moved into the dark of the aqua legia so that coloration is still coming through but the aqua legia look as though they're floating and you go down to the bottom and then there's under planting of white which just shows out really really well coming through at the back there so you can have them layered as well so that's sort of what i try to achieve with this type of planting and it's just a matter of looking at things and going would these go together nicely and that's what i look at when i'm looking at it and sometimes it's even as intricate as looking into the center of a flower because things like verbascum for instance which were a tall spiked plant with lovely round flowers multiple up the flower spike they have very definite different colored anthers so if it's something like which is a lovely orangey yellow but it's got red anthers and it's got a lovely green leaf so the green leaf is at the base you've got this lovely tall slender stem and then this lovely flower head at the top you can pair it with something that's red because the red in the center goes with the red or you can pair it with another softer yellow depending on what you're wanting to do with it in this part of the border you can see there are some repeats so from the bronze regercia there we've then got the regercia we have a different hosta so we've used a blue hosta this time but it still gives you that effect and the black acrolegia coming over the top so it doesn't matter the repeat is not exactly the same but it's utilizing similar material and you have your definite points and then you can move around and have yet another one within that and it's just a matter of mixing and matching and making sure that those plants all go together in this area of the border i've tried to utilize a bit of yellow people are scared of yellow yellow is brilliant you can have something like this wonderful daisy here the deronicum and in a shady area it pings out at you and then against some lovely foliage and then into this amazing umbellifery here called zizia and zizia again it's just light it's airy and your eye is drawn through to those and then you go back and past into some beautiful reverses of the leaves so it's not just the front of the leaves when the wind blows and you see the reverse of the leaves you get more color as well so just think about those and then the digitalis there the apricot foxgloves just absolutely beautiful going in and making it all soft but they're uprights and you've got the flat of the daisy you've got the flat of the umbellifery and the sort of lower but spikiness of the riem leaf that's an ornamental rhubarb so there you go that's just how it is it's using flats and rounds with spikes and big shapes and just mixing them together another thing i've really learned from having my own herbaceous border is that it never stays the same even when you get it to perfection the following year there'll be gaps something's died off maybe something's grown too big and is bullying out the other plants so i found it really valuable to listen to this advice from henry mccauley from merchants hardy plants on how to fill gaps and when the best time is to plant your border generally autumn is a good time to plant because there's some warmth in the soil you can work on the borders and create some goodness by giving mulch in there and it gives that plant a chance to establish more hopefully get its roots down get it more comfortable get settled so that whatever winter throws at it it'll be slightly stronger by the time spring comes around and of course if you get a really wet spring that might help but if you plant something in the spring and it doesn't rain for months on end then that can be a real problem i have literally been looking at this to redo my own border at the moment and i keep thinking well i need to get most of it planted now and then i think salvias no i have to wait till the spring dahlias no i definitely can't dig up my dailies and then replant them so what plants actually are best left until the spring well particularly the example you've just mentioned salvias and dahlias and and certainly for example exotic plants they won't really want to go out and be planted in the autumn it's really not good for them and anything really that's half hardy look at the label look for identification will be that much more tender and so you can do it but you'll be taking risk it might be better to take a cutting and get that into root so that by the time spring comes around that plant has a better chance you can ask nursery men always ask wherever you go but you do know that most plants they need to have a group good root system so one you can also do is have a look in the pot take the plant out see what roots are going on there if the roots are weak then chances are the plant really won't do well over winter at all it might have a chance to get away but i wouldn't risk that and what else do we need to think when we're kind of filling gaps i mean how do we match up plants to the plants that are already in our borders well the main thing is that don't plant something when it's going to be surrounded so lots of people now don't cut their borders down until the spring which is pretty good for wildlife but if you were to put a little plant in like a nine centimeter pot into a border where it's surrounded by great big thugs or great big grasses and in the winter you might find it all flops on top of your plant your little baby gets squished and unfortunately that'll be the last you see of that plant so the idea look at what you're planting clear a bigger space you are going to clear give things more of a chance most plants want to take over the world they're strong and they will compete but some are better than others so if you have a weaker plant next to a stronger plant that one that's a bit stronger will give it will be too strong so really what you're looking for is giving everything a good equal start in life and in terms of choosing say shapes and colors and everything if you've got a border that it's been like that you know you've enjoyed it for five six seven eight years and suddenly this summer hit it and you know you lost quite a few plants is that what are you thinking about in terms of color and shape and everything like that the main thing is a lot of it is personal you always have to go with gut instinct the fundamental thing for color is things like whether you want contrasting color or sympathetic color and that's on your mood what you're looking for but it's much more complicated than that you're looking at things like where there's movement in the grass or you're looking for shape and form it's not really great to have one broad leaf plant next on the broad leaf plant you want a bit of contrast so things just spiky do particularly well against things which are flatter you're looking for those bit of drama you want plants that will come forward do their kind of solo and then retire a bit so you're always looking to play all those things together so for example you can have uh which is really good at this time of year next year fuchsia magellica uh thompson thompsonii which is really great and those two are particularly good with the serra patosi salvia behind they're all in sort of certain colors but each has got something unique each is playing off the others and they are really good as a three to combine so they're basically similar colors but they're actually very different shapes and styles of plant so you're getting that contrast there absolutely and you can go sometimes similar we also have a serra patosi salvia which is this shocking pink next to a red persicaria and some people might think that's too similar but actually if a lot of it works really well the fundamental thing is a bit of difference but you're looking for normally a bit of drama a bit of personality so you'll have that difference and also adding the types of plant so grasses tend not to have a lot of color some do but a lot don't they'll have an accent they'll be verticality to them which looks particularly good often against broad leaves or lower plants you might prefer a sedum which is a broad leaf purple one a really dark one up against a spiky glaucus flower so you think about that purple leaf against a spike of a grass could be sessilaria nitida up against a sedum that will look really good too and is there any other advice you've got on choosing grasses and using them in borders because i have to admit i've always been very hesitant about that and i think a lot of people are grasses are fantastic they add so much to a border but people are understandably nervous about them because some get too big some can be a bit thuggish and so i was just a lot of people then just experiment see what they like the main thing they add is they can add a bit of verticality but they also add sound the sound of movement and a lightness and texture and also in the autumn many turn a certain color such as gold which really lifts the garden and then in the winter you get that fantastic structure which lots of the herbaceous plants have just died away and gone so you're left with a spine in your garden which is really really good the main thing is to look for grass that fundamentally you like there are lots in the millennia's we have miscanthuses some are really big some are smaller and panicums a lot which are really very good and have a really good year and also of course remembering about your climate in your soil because i think a lot of us are finding perhaps the panicums because they're very drought tolerant and putting up with the really tough summers any sort of plants that can be a bit more touchy about that in terms of the grasses in terms of grasses it really is that list so we have miscanthus did really well but this year they they got browned a bit they really had a bit of tough time a lot of them had creme roulette option this year because they just got hit by that heat after the drought millennia's are very good but again they will tell you if it's a bit too dry it is panicums that we found have been the best performers really they just seem to have that bit of resilience and in terms of other plants what would you say i mean what would you say this is a plant i would always have these days it's hard to beat salvias once the sunshine gets going they will often flower all summer long and salvias come in so many different shapes and sizes you do need to be careful over winter they don't get too wet and too cold but once they start flowering they can flower their socks off and often it's a really strong color there's some subtle ones and paler ones but for sheer strength of character and one of the benefits of them is because they come from mexico they're summer dormant so over there they've acquired they flower in the spring have a quiet summer and come back in the autumn in our climate they found the spring find that summer really quite nice thank you very much so they carry on all the way through so you get a lot longer flowering season which is fantastic oh i'd wondered why that how they managed to keep going any other plants that you think really top for a really great herbaceous border well i love echinaceas personally i think they're fantastic as a group the one thing i have always learned through is you need to give them space so they they look beautiful when they come out they get lots of different colors pinks and whites and some newer ones too which are really interesting and the cones particularly are really good when they die they can leave a certain structure but echinaceas can't be crowded so an important tip is make sure you buy more of them give them bigger space and any other top plants you can recommend we really recommend agapanthus they're really good plants from south africa but they are really strong and you get a whole different set of colors and you get quite short ones quite tall ones and that means you can combine them differently so is there any other advice you've got for people who are basically restocking their gardens after a really difficult year well one of the most important things is i hate to say it's a bit like natural selection look around in your garden see what did well and see what didn't do well because i'm afraid to say it is a time for hard choices the tougher weather seems to be going in a certain direction so we need to make difficult choices about that flocks for example a lot of people they really have realized it doesn't actually cope with full sun in your own garden look at what's done well also in the area look around the area if you can talk to your neighbors find out what's done well for them too a lot of people are moving to more drought tolerant planting so the other thing you can do is start to plan ahead it is better to clear a large area as large as you can then clear little bits if you're clearing small you'll just chink around the edges it's better to clear a large area of border and start again it also means you can add more compost if you want to the soil or if you're looking for drier sometimes grit sometimes better drainage it depends what you're trying to do but it's best not to just do a bit of tinkering it's best to go in with both feet when i recently revamped my own herbaceous border i had a couple of comments from people saying that if you dig up an entire border and then you replace it with plants it's really expensive and that actually you'd have to be quite wealthy to do it and of course i agree they're absolutely right but actually that's not what most of us do there are lots of ways of cutting costs in your herbaceous border and so here are the best ones i've been checking out the best tips for saving money if you want to create a beautiful border but of course in order to work out whether those tips will work for you you need to know the pros and cons of those tips and how much you could actually save you may be starting from scratch maybe putting a border where there hasn't been one before or completely changing a current border obviously you may be working in a different currency from what i am and plants may be more expensive or cheaper where you are but just knowing what the costs are on one border shows you how much proportionately you could save with some of these tips i researched how much perhaps a landscaper might charge to fill an entire border and i also looked at the cost of plants online and in a nursery and measured out a square meter of my own garden and it is difficult to do an estimate but i'm estimating around 50 pounds per square meter my border is 10 meters by 3 so that's 30 square meters and that would mean completely restocking it from scratch would cost 1500 pounds which is a significant investment the first tip that any garden designer will give you about saving money in the garden is to make a shopping list before you leave the house if you just walk into a garden center or nursery and put the plants that seem most attractive into your basket you'll finish up buying lots of things that look good at one particular time of year and leave you with gaps at the rest of the year it's also very easy to overbuy but this tip is about not having wastage there are also quite a lot of factors in choosing the right plant for the right place which is why i write them down on a sort of grid format on a list the factors include whether the plants need a sunny or shady spot their height their spread their flower color when they flower their foliage interest whether they're useful for wildlife and any other factor that's important to you so i put this on a grid list and in fact you can download this from my website for free it's called the beautiful borders checklist but you could also do it yourself on excel and it took me several hours to actually really research what plants i wanted and fill out the list and everything like that and then i went to the great dixter plant fair because it has lots of lovely independent nurseries to buy the plants and of course i forgot the list but what i found out was that having done the work on the list i was very much more focused when i actually came to choosing the plants people often ask if it's cheaper to get plants from local nurseries and local growers than it is to go to garden centers and i don't think it is cheaper i haven't particularly seen that it's cheaper however it can mean less wastage if you buy a plant from someone who's grown it locally it will be used to your conditions and your soil and additionally you'll be able to talk to the grower and ask their advice and that's absolutely invaluable so if you want successful plants i think buying from local independent growers is a really good idea when i got home from great dixter with my haul i actually did the list again with the heights and the spread and the flowering color and the foliage color and everything because it was hugely helpful when i planted it out the second tip which you'll see quoted quite widely is also about keeping the long-term costs of your border down rather than saving on the initial cost and that is to choose perennials or shrubs instead of annuals annuals are plants that grow from seed flower and die in one year and they have been the mainstay of color in garden borders for a long time and they provide wonderful color however if you have to buy flowers and plants every year those costs are going to add up over the years perennials are plants which stay in your ground for three years or more and shrubs are plants which stay in the ground for three years or more and have a woody structure to them and of course even though perennials and shrubs are not cheaper than annuals in fact they may be slightly more expensive they nevertheless stay in your garden for years on end and they reduce the long-term maintenance the third tip however really will take some money off that 1500 pounds and that is reuse some of your old plants of course if you're starting a border from scratch you may not be able to do that but if you're completely renovating a border you will actually have to dig up as many of the plants as you can garden designers made it absolutely clear to me that i really needed to clear the border as much as possible because otherwise i would just be planting around the old border design and making compromises about where plants needed to go however some of the plants i dug up i put in pots and i'll be replanting them in the border in different places and there are also a core of plants and trees that i didn't want to dig up and i definitely wanted to keep and apart from the trees those were the roses and the irises so adding together the plants that i've kept in the border and actually kept in pots to replant in the border that's about 10 of the border so that would save me 150 pounds our back borders also need replanting and some of the plants i've dug out of the main border are simply going into the back border because there isn't a budget for renovating the back border when you buy your plants can really save you money at the end of the summer in the autumn you'll see discounts of up to 40 percent plants are not looking at their most attractive at that time of year and people aren't thinking about their gardens but autumn is a really good time to plant perennials and shrubs and many gardeners are now tending to plant in autumn rather than in spring i saw discounts of at least 40 percent when i was shopping for plants in the autumn and i filled about a third of my border with these plants there is a slight problem in the sense that you do have to buy plants that will be happy in the soil in their first winter many plants which will be hardy once established may be a bit more vulnerable if you get very bad weather in their first winter and for example salvias are one of these i interviewed the uk's leading salvia expert william dyson on growing salvias and i'll put that video in the description below and he said that salvias really should be planted in spring so i bought a couple of salvias and i kept them in my potting shed over winter and they're looking very healthy so looking at what i saved by buying plants in the autumn rather than the spring i reckon that's about a third of the border and that's 40 percent off so i reckon that saved me 180 pounds the next money saving tip is one that can really cut the cost of your borders although i haven't used it as much as i could have done and that's propagating plants i'll put a video about propagating plants in the description below but at its simplest it's cutting a little bit off plants sticking them into potting compost letting the roots grow and growing another plant propagating isn't difficult but you can have losses so you would need to propagate more plants than you need and of course if you're going to have a border which has say 180 plants in it or 200 plants in it like mine you'd have to propagate about 240 plants to get a completely free border the other thing is of course you would have to rely on having friends who've got plants that you want you always have to ask people before you snip a bit off for propagating some people have sort of traditionally sneaked a little bit of a cutting into their bag but this is frowned upon because in gardens which have lots of visitors if there are one or two very special plants and even a small percentage take cuttings from those plants then it can really affect the shape of the plant how it's pruned and it's flowering i reckon that most home gardeners could probably take 12 to 15 cuttings and the thing is of course you have to take them the year before you're going to plant them because they need to grow on before you can plant them in the soil but if you're planning to have a new border next year you could propagate this year and i reckon even with just 12 to 15 plants you could save 90 pounds the other tip that can really save you lots of money is growing from seed you can grow lots of plants from seeds and if they're not annuals you will have to say grow them from seed this year and then bring them on for a couple of years before they're ready to plant in the ground but if you grow your annuals from seed you can really save money a packet of cosmos will likely to be about five pounds or less and you can usually grow about 30 plants from that but if you buy cosmos as seedlings or plantlets you probably pay at least a pound for them so that's a very good saving and if you're revamping your border from scratch you will have gaps in the first year and annuals will fill those gaps beautifully i reckon i've saved about 25 pounds from growing from seed and you could certainly save more the next tip is one where i have actually saved a lot but it isn't right for everybody and that is self-seeding plants i've got over 25 self-seeding plants in this garden and they've been here for quite a long time so it's been easy for me to go around the garden and pick up things like self-seeded lichness coronaria or red campion and which has grown in the path and i will dig up five or six plants and then plant a little group of them in the new border but if you are a really keen weeder and you like to keep your garden neat and tidy it will be harder for you to have self-seeded plants self-seeded plants and weeds look very much the same when they emerge so you have to actually let them get to a certain size before you can tell whether they're plants you want and not everyone's happy to do that and of course if your garden is completely empty and you're starting from scratch you won't have any self-seeders anyway however looking at the self-seeded plants planted in my revamp border i reckon i have saved about 125 pounds another very good tip which we can all enjoy is buy smaller plants a plant in a nine centimeter pot and a plant in a two liter pot will grow to the same size eventually obviously the smaller plant will take longer but it costs about half you don't always get the opportunity to choose between the nine centimeter pots and the two liter pots however i have bought most of my in nine centimeter pots and i reckon i've saved about 225 pounds as a result they are very tiny plants and so i've got lots of little plants in the border with big gaps between them and those gaps obviously will be there in the summer and i'll maybe fill them with annuals so it's not a perfect way of doing it but it is a substantial saving and ultimately those nine centimeter pots will actually create just as big plants as the two liter pots if you add up all those savings it's actually over half the cost of the 1500 of course once you've got your border looking amazing you want to keep it looking amazing and what with all this extreme weather around that can be difficult but if you get things like watering and pruning right then actually the border will go on looking good so don't miss this video coming up next on how to save your garden from stressful weather and thank you for watching, goodbye!