We're here to talk about selecting plants
and plant combinations in order to create a beautiful border. And I'm with Steve Edney,
who many of you will remember from the 'Growing Dahlias' video which I'll put in the
description below and we're here at his No Name Nursery that he runs with his partner Louise Dowle. And
he's also a head gardener and gardening consultant. I'll put links to plant names and to the No Name
Nursery and any other resources we mention in the description below, and also with time stamps -
you can jump to any part of the video you like. If you're new here, the Middlesized Garden uploads
weekly with tips, ideas and inspiration for your garden, so if you'd like to see the videos when
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video is uploaded, then tap the 'notifications' bell. So Steve, tell me what you're doing here with
the No Name Nursery. Me and my partner Louise were lucky enough to get a piece of land and we
wanted to create a garden and a nursery of our own, a place to to escape and enjoy the world and
to create a sustainable nursery and to grow an eclectic mix of plants that that we adore and love,
but we wanted to use them and combine them in beds and borders, and in a garden setting, so that we
could continually assess plants, while we're also offering them for sale, because I always say
that you should know what you grow and a lot of nurseries grow plants and they're wonderful at
it, but they aren't necessarily gardeners. Whereas me and Louise - first and foremost -I guess we are
gardeners and and nursery growers as well. And in fact you must have one of the longest long borders in
the country here, so you're growing all your plants in context and you're seeing how they
perform with each other, is that right ? Yes, so I guess it's the boy in me that
wanted to have the biggest, having a long border that's 100 meters long and six
meters deep and actually it's also definitely an appeal to Louise as well that the two of us can
have a border that we can fit nearly 500 different perennial type of plants into. That means
that the opportunity to create combinations and really big bold groups is so much greater
and we modeled it actually on the proportions of the Wisley long border at RHS Wisley in Surrey
because we we visit there quite a lot and I work on plant trials and as a member of the herbaceous
committee at the RHS and we wanted the border to be a real centerpiece for our own garden, which actually
for the most part is quite a wild garden, and not too perfectly manicured.
It's very important that it has a strong environmental lean and that we're very
considerate of wildlife, invertebrates, mammals - there'll be water, there's lots of bee fodder but
also places hiding places and overwintering places for animals and and we share this piece of
land with all of the local wildlife, which is in a wider context all around us not just within
our own with our own site. Could you just briefly explain about the proportion of the border - I think
maybe when we're in our own home gardens, we might not be thinking about proportion
in our borders, so what was that calculation? It can be quite unique to an individual
site but really what you want to be careful is that your borders are not too apologetic. You
know, sometimes people are afraid to make a border that is larger than than they think they can cope
with, but actually if you're planting it correctly and densely enough, it actually keeps most of
the weeds at bay. And so what you don't want is a border to too skinny and too long, because then
it won't feel right and it definitely will feel very small and insignificant, you don't want it
to be too dumpy, so you don't want it to be deep but ever so narrow, so it has a lot to do with
your site, with your garden, wherever you are and it doesn't matter whether it's a hundred meters
long or two meters long. So for for us, when we're thinking about proportions we think about does it
feel right? does it look right? It's much more about how a border feels in relation to the rest of
your garden and your space. And for us having a nice straight, linear edge is very satisfying,
because the border itself is quite chaotic and jumbly and and tightly packed, so to see
a nice sharp edges is quite important, but also we had a huge hedge behind us, which was a tree line -
that's a wonderful windbreak- that's very important but being six meters tall, if we made the border
too small, it would be completely out of scale. Thinking about how you select plants - if you
think about going to the garden center or to the nursery or to the plant fair and thinking 'I
really want to make my border a bit more exciting next year', so how would you suggest people start
thinking? OK so 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 and so, for instance, this
this wonderful Eryngium, here which is yuccifolium, chosen because of its drought tolerance,
but also because it's incredibly architectural, not just with these these wonderful seed heads I
mean they're 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 yuccifolium as
in it's a yucca like - like the 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
and it's surprisingly drought tolerant and actually surprisingly stable for such a tall perennial -
it's 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
Wilmott. I love the the opposition between what is effectively such a such a tasteful wonderful sort
of creamy 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 Stipa giganteum 'Kleinfontaine', which is a relatively new cultivar to us - so lots
of the plants in the long border here, actually are - we've picked plants that we don't know
very well so we can experiment and try new things 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,
we think it's wonderful - it is a bee magnet and the bees they pour all
over this plant and in fact you even sometimes find them either drunk or sleeping in it, I'm
not quite sure which one it is but they're all over it and and they're face down
like a like a man had too much at the the bar and so they just go absolutely mad
for that. There's a geranium knitting in as well very nicely, called 'Dilys' between the Eryngium
and the Stipa. 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, but it could be a wonderful perennial like verbena bonariensis, for instance, which 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 many gardeners refer to that as editing, so you take it out where you don't want it
and it's the same with the combinations here - if something's got a bit too
big for its boots or there's a bit too much, we might snip a little bit out or we might
encourage and train it to knit in with the group of plants next to it. The thing that you always have to be on the watch for is that one plant doesn't get too big for its boots
and starts to crowd its neighbor and then eventually that leads to a plant death, because
one plant has got a bit too over ambitious and has crowded its neighbor and that neighbor
has died. So 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 Veronicastrum here at the front (Roseum)
which is just a nice vertical punch. So when we're thinking about how to combine plants,
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 has wonderful purple foliage, wonderful
purple flowers and an incredibly long flowering period so it's right down on the front here,
but all in the latter part of the summer so in the spring, this border is 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. And would you say when planting with something
like sedum which is quite low and flat, that to make sure you've got enough upright around it -
looking at this grouping, it sort of seems that there's quite a deliberate aim to make sure that
about half of that is upright? So you're quite right, 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 in their borders they've planted plants that are
all the same height, so there's no drama within the border. Everyone is obsessed with flowers but
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 - 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 even sometimes flies - and none of us like flies
particularly, but they're also very important to biodiversity - and we tend to focus
on just 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 movement, so so don't be afraid to plant grasses that are significantly
larger, perhaps uh 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% unless you've made a
conscious choice to do that, but with 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 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, Ii 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 are there enough flowers? You know
I was hoping for a bit more going on - the grasses are wonderful, but I'd like a a bit more
flower and interest from from the color. Plants all by themselves in a monoculture never really
appeals to me - even dahlias - I know I love a dahlia, but I'd much rather see them combined in beds and borders,
it's the same with roses so 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. So this Persicaria 'Indian Summer' - it's a plant
that we can't agree on. The problem I have is not the plant itself - you know I adore the plant - we
saw it together in the Netherlands in a wonderful garden (Bob Foltz - Tuingoed Foltz) and it was in a setting I
felt was right, in an exotic planting scheme - I just don't think it's right here in our in our
perennial long border, I think it would be better over in our jungle garden. I think it works here
because of the colouring of the leaf, especially as it gives us some added autumn colour to this space.
The bees love it and you know we have got room to have it over in the jungle garden as well as in this
border, I mean you know it's quite big enough this border to take the odd thing that we don't
agree on. Well that's true and I guess ultimately when you're trying to resolve- if you're both very
keen gardeners and you know you have plants that you love and plants that you don't and you are
individuals, so that's going to be different for each of you - you know and I know there are plants up
and down this border that I love that you don't and it's the same the other way around but I
just don't think it's really working and you do. I think for me it's also the color
of the flower, it's just that we we were quite vigorous with
each other about the color limitation of the color palette within this border and you've
um, you've thrown caution to the wind there - I think it's a bit too red for this border. Says the
man that wants to put yellow and white in here! Oh don't forget the orange I want a bit of
orange in here too. I think at the moment it doesn't look too bad, do you know it's earlier
in the season that I dislike it intensely because of its form and its growing habit
as it's developing earlier in the summer. As I walk past, it offends me continuously. If the
leaves were really just green, it'd be going but because of the purple in leaves, it softens
the flower color dow, it doesn't stand out so much. I can't disagree because I do think it's a
wonderful plant and I'm certainly not berating the plant and you know there isn't such a thing
as a bad plant, there there are just bad gardeners who perhaps aren't using plants in the right ways,
sometimes all the elements are correct and you're just not getting it right when putting them together,
and this is where our creativity kicks in and and we just bounce off each other,
sometimes that is in almost violent arguments, and people around us are just kind of thinking 'oh no' but I think all of the the best things come out of a creative melting pot, which is what the two
of us are together, I mean I'll continue to challenge you over that plant and I know you will
do the same with other plants around the border - anything else you can add to convince me to
keep that, to want to keep that plant there? Maybe....I think it's going, it's
coming out! No, it's not - I think it needs something different around it, it it'll make it look
different with a different combination around it. Do you think maybe it's because we've got
a few other plants which are all a similar height around it? Yeah and it needs some more drama
with it. And so actually maybe this is partly our own fault for making other plant choices
around it - that we could make better choices but the plant behind it has only just gone in this year so
it's not going to reach its its height potential until year three - because it's year one and
and most perennials don't reach their peak flowering performance and growth until year
three, so we're expecting it to be about a third taller in a couple of years time - that will
help. And the grass was moved again this year. And we did drop in these
wonderful annual Ricinus 'New Zealand Purple' which actually are doing a wonderful job of completely
masking the plant, so I don't have to look at it. If you'd like to know more
about creating beautiful borders, check out our beautiful borders playlist at the
end of this video and let me know if you have any particularly favorite perennial plant combinations
in the comments, and thank you for watching, goodbye!
