How to Make a Narrow Border Look Full & Beautiful.

Would you believe that this border is only two feet, two and a half feet, that's 60 to 80 centimeters deep, and it's absolutely buzzing with pollinators and spilling out over the path? It's Alexandra here from the Middlesized Garden YouTube channel and blog and I went down to Chalford House to talk to owner Paul Morrow and gardener Mark Verhuis about how they created this amazing border in such a small space. Chalford House itself is a large garden, it's got 10 acres, it's got garden rooms, it's got pools, it's got terraces, it's absolutely beautiful, wonderful woodland views, and it's open for the National Garden Scheme and garden tours. But whether you've got a large garden or a smaller garden, I think this idea of having a narrow border or a small border somewhere which is full of flowers is really worthwhile for two reasons. Firstly, a small area is much less to look after than a bigger one. This kind of gardening needs water. Chalford House has its own boreholes and it has drip irrigation, but if you don't have drip irrigation, which is the most effective and efficient form of watering, then a small area isn't so much work to do with a watering can and also it's not using so much water. And the other reason why I think it's worth having beautiful flowers, preferably somewhere you can enjoy it, is that the pollinators need them. In my garden, which is so dry after three months drought, there are far fewer flowers than normal and this must be causing a bit of a problem for bees, butterflies and other pollinators, but here at Chalford House the border is buzzing. The techniques are a bit different, so let's go over to Chalford House and talk to Paul Morrow and Mark Verhuis about the special tricks they use to create such abundance in such a small space. One of the fantastic things about the garden is the planting, just the colour. It's really, I think, exceptional planting. What I wanted to concentrate on is that the borders close to the house are not big. This garden is big, but the borders close to the house are really quite small. They would fit into almost any garden and it's quite challenging to make small borders look as good as yours. So can we go through how you plan them, how you plant them and what really works? Well, they are narrow along the terrace and that has to be because of the width of the path, the oak stone path and the stone wall that was existing. So they are only about 60 centimetres deep and they widen to maybe 80, so every gardener can associate with that. They're close to the inside of the house, so we look at it all the time and so it is a different formula from the rest of the garden. I decided to obviously have some structure, which are the spheres, the evergreen spheres, which give some winter interest, but unlike a lot of the other borders, it does have quite a lot of annuals put in, but there are quite a few herbaceous plants. So I would say it's 50-50, whereas other borders in the garden might be more 70-30 permanent planting. We put in quite a few tulips in the past. We've only been doing it for two years. This is the second year. So where the summer annuals are, obviously then we go to tulips and maybe some wallflowers or forget-me-nots, but we swap that over and then in the summer we have the mixture that you're seeing now, which is very cottage garden, which is what I love, sort of romantic, quite planned, but really a lot of the time it's the accidents that are better than the planning. And when it comes to planting them, I don't have a set routine. I have my favourite plants that we've either grown from seed or have grown, and I set them out on the path and we fiddle around. We may repeat, obviously, it's always pleasing to the eye to repeat the planting. And the annuals like Cosmos, Nicosiana, we put Cleome in, Verbenas, all quite pretty cottage garden annuals, and that really, with the irrigation that we have in those beds, not very much the irrigation, we know we can have a really good display right through until October. So earlier on you have Alchemilla, Nepeta, things like that. And then this year we cut them right back when we were planting the annuals. And this was the last week of May, early June, because the Nepeta was still looking lovely, the Alchemilla, but we had all our annuals ready to go in and there wasn't a lot of space. And so this year we cut everything right back. There were no leaves at all. And with the irrigation, I knew that it would be watered for half an hour every evening, that we had then the room to plant all the annuals. And within a couple of weeks with the warm weather in June, it was already looking really good and it filled out. The Nepeta has returned, the Alchemilla all as fresh as anything, and it's really worked very well this year. It's a good method, I think, for the future. In terms of colour, how do you plan the colour? Well, colour is very personal. I've always liked the muted colours along the horse. I think silver foliage and pale blue, pale pink looks really lovely together, and some white. I think perhaps you can make a mistake using too much white. So I think white can be a bit difficult sometimes in a garden, but obviously it's lovely, but sparingly perhaps. If someone's planning their border, would you recommend, say, three or four colours? Definitely three or four. I think it's easy because I've always done the muted colours. And then in another part of the garden, we did remove all the yellow and red, bright red and orange plants that were here. Obviously, I didn't want to waste them, and we have done a hot garden. So we've put all those together and then added dahlias and annuals of brighter colours. And that comes into its own really more at the end of July, August, September. Like many plants, there are quite a lot of yellow and red, orange plants like Helenium and Solidago dahlias and all the annuals like Tachytis. They all veer to that bright colour. And that's new to me, but I've really enjoyed doing it. And I think when we open in August, then people are very pleased to see another side of the other colours. It's lovely to be able to have a bit of everything here as it is a big garden before I was limited, but I've enjoyed experimenting and will carry on in the future. In terms of actual planting, is there anything you do? Add fertiliser to each hole or do you mulch the whole border? Well, we do mulch the borders with two or three inches of compost. That obviously is great for moisture retention and for keeping the weeds down. With a border that you're putting a lot of stuff into, you put the compost in. It is forked in earlier in the year. Ideally, you might do it in the autumn when you take all the annuals out, and then it is incorporated into the soil. But you might put a little bit again on when the plants are just coming up, when you remove the tulips, and then before you plant your summer annuals, you may have a fresh amount on the top. Once we've planted the borders around the house, we've done no weeding. I think one or two rogue weeds, but really none. We are very careful with obviously deadheading is so important to keep the annuals going. And after we did this cut back at the end of May, really it's been labour-free other than deadheading in the evening. Although it looks very high maintenance, it was planted in one day between myself and my gardener. And we obviously, as the season is going on, we are now staking some of the plants because they are getting taller. Mart has been very cleverly staking, and we do use hazel sticks as well just to support some of the plants to keep it as natural as possible. You don't really see the staking, which of course is the art of gardening, which is so important. That's what I really have enjoyed all my career. And are there any particular favourite plants that you've got in there? Anything that's what I call attract pretty is and soft. They all attract insects. This year we have had many, many butterflies, which is great to see. The bees love them. It's a happy garden. We have a lot of wildlife, lots of frogs and newts and toads and grass snakes and everything. It's all there. I do have my favourites. I think for the summer, the cosmos, the Nicosiana. I do love the Cleome. We've got Lavatera, two or three varieties. And also Verbena, I think are lovely. We've got some that get quite large. I mean, almost nearly a metre across, which we grow from cutting. Some favourite varieties, which are in lavender and blue and a darker purple and a lovely deep red one, the sort of claret colour, which gives a bit of depth to the colour scheme. But I can't think there are many plants I would say I don't like. I think there is a place for every plant. And in a large garden, I'm just grateful to cover the soil and fill the beds rather than any weeds. I'm very lucky to have Mart who has joined me last year, who is a great propagator and loves plants. Clearly, he's in love with plants even more than I am, I think. So that's refreshing. He's just brilliant at propagating. He's got great green fingers. He has very interesting methods for propagating. In terms of the number of plants, when you're grouping them, how do you group them? Is it in threes or fives? This is quite a small border. It's only 60 to 80 centimetres deep. How do you manage that? Well, once we cut everything back, I have the different varieties that I've obviously grown. I often think if they were naturally growing in the wild, that you would have maybe not necessarily three, but there'd be two, and then there would be one, and then further down there might be three. But I'd never keep it to the same. So it's random. And also, if you have borders either side, you probably don't want them exactly opposite, but alternate. But then I just move it around a little bit. That's something that I think is the fun of gardening. I don't think there's any set pattern, and very often a mistake is better than the plan. I think you can be too deep about it. It obviously comes maybe a bit more naturally to someone who's done it for all my life I've done it. But I do think if you think too deeply, it gets too complicated. It could be 10 different ways. It would still look lovely. And in terms of repetition, roughly, how much would you say you repeat the same plant all the way along those borders? I think if you're using several different plants and colors, you don't want to repeat it too often. It looks too planned. I think it's best just to maybe repeat it twice or three, depending on the length. It's actually the borders you're talking about are very long, although they're narrow. If you were to imagine a watercolor painting, I just think it's quite nice to see the movement running through. It could be a smaller mountain and larger, and then maybe a little bit in the distance. Try not to make it too pre-planned, I suppose, looking. All these plants you can see through to the lawn and beyond. It's romantic, and I think it gives people a very good feeling. It just seems to anyway, and it certainly does for me. And the other borders you've got near the house, which are those over there, they're actually really quite deep borders, aren't they? So you're going from very narrow to very deep. Is there anything different about the deep borders that you think people should know if they're thinking? Well, then you can use much larger plants. So there are some very big shrubs in there, and then there's quite a big selection of herbaceous plants. These are completely mixed borders, which is more typical of the rest of the garden. It's going to be 30% shrubs, 30% herbaceous, and maybe 30 to 40% annuals, day years being included in the annuals, things that come in and out. It can be whatever mixture, but I think in a bigger border, you do need more structure. And Mart also has some very valuable tips. When I came here first for my job interview, I've seen this bit of the garden, and it was in my mind, I've never seen a garden more beautiful than that. And I think it's hard not to agree with me. And Paul already explained about the narrow borders, but I would like to talk about the height of the plants, because if you've got a narrow border, then make it high. And especially, it works even in a psychological way, that when we've been tiny kids and the plants have been big and around us, and we felt safe. And actually, in our adulthood, we are looking for the same feelings, that the plants are tall and around us, and it makes us more happy. But I want to say that in the wintertime, it's very important that you've got some structure on the borders, and these Portuguese laurel balls will follow the borders all over its length. But in the wintertime, you hardly can see anything else over here, because all the perennials, everything is cut back. And basically, the recipe of this border is that it is a perennial border, but the perennials are not planted very densely. There are some three-foot, five-foot gaps in between the perennials, which we are all filling up with annuals. And the annuals have been slightly overlooked, but there is nothing more beautiful than them, especially the second half of the season. This is one of the cosmos, which is called double-click cranberry. And a lot of things have been self-seeding themselves. When we are tidying up the borders, if we can find some seedling, not even in a very right place, we can replant it, but mostly we are just leaving it. And as Paul mentioned earlier, since an accident is actually the best thing to happen, we've got some grasses as well, which we haven't mentioned. This one is called fairy tails, which is a very gentle sort of grass. Here we have quite a mixture of plants, and it is literally a lot of my favorites, all put in together with some perennials in between. These are the Nepeta that we mentioned that we cut back the very first week of June, which is quite late. So it's not a Chelsea chop, and it's not a Hampton hat. I don't know what it is, but it's worked well, made space for really quite a lot of annuals in here. And the diocese, which is pretty, enjoys this slightly sheltered wall here. We're now in the middle of August, and you can see there's a lot of color, and there's just two drips of irrigation every eight inches. And it's quite water efficient, very little water used. Half an hour every night in the middle of the night when it's cool, 3 a.m. in the morning, preferably that's the best time. Really flowering since mid-June, we've had really great growth, but it is quite embroidery effect of mixture. It is quite natural, and there are not threes of anything. There are one and two, and then maybe one or three, but quite random planting. For another look at how people do their borders, there's a video coming up next with Paul and Frances Moskovitz, who have packed an enormous amount of color into their borders, and they've used different methods again, but then that's the fun of gardening, because one thing works for one person, one thing works for another, and it's always good to experiment. So don't miss this video coming up next, and thank you for watching. Goodbye!