How to plan a flower border - top professional tips

hi there it's alexandra from the middlesized garden youtube channel and blog and we're going to talk about how to plan a flower border you can plan a flower border at any time of year but it's a particularly good idea to do it in winter or possibly autumn or even spring but while everything is just a little bit quiet out in the garden and you've got time to think i've asked three brilliant garden designers to give me their top tips on planning a flower boarder and they are garden designer author and blogger jack wellington garden designer posie gentles and garden designer and youtuber and blogger lee berkel of garden ninja and i'll put links to them in the description below if you're new here the middle sized garden uploads free videos every saturday and if you'd like to get them when you open up youtube then click on subscribe and if you'd like youtube to tell you when a new video is published then click on the notifications bell there are basically five elements to a flower border and the first one is a tree and it's a good idea to start with a tree even a small fruit tree the other four elements are shrubs bulbs perennials and annuals or sometimes people would say annuals and biennials shrubs are woody plants they have a woody stem which stays above the ground all the time and actually shrubs can grow up virtually into small trees and indeed small trees can be cut and used almost as shrubs so the two are quite similar bulbs are plants that carry all the nutrition and everything they need for one year's growth in an underground storage chamber which is called a bulb typically we think of daffodils and tulips as bulbs and in the summer there are lilies and in the autumn there are nereins bulbs are particularly useful in planning a border because their leaves come up often say in the spring for a few weeks and they cover the bare soil and then the flowers come out and after the flowers are over the bulbs leaves will stay above ground for about six weeks while they gather together all the nutrition they need for next year and they then disappear under the ground again so you can plant something else and bring some more flowers in in big professional gardens they often dig their bulbs up because they need to really pack in the color and the action but i just plant my bulbs quite deep and i just plant annuals on top of them perennials are really the backbone of a flower border now these are plants that live in the garden for two years or more and they can be evergreen and keep their leaves on in the winter and then finally we come to annuals annuals are plants that germinate and grow and flower and then set seed and die all in one year and they're very easy to grow from seed and you can also buy annuals quite cheaply they're known as bedding plants so they are fantastically useful for filling in gaps you can just see that you've got a gap say may or june and you don't have to think about how a plant grows you just go to the garden center and you choose the annuals that you like and you stick them in the gaps so they are extremely useful biennials do the same process but over two years and they're things like fox gloves and wall flowers and they're also very useful typically annuals are plants like poppies and marigolds and cleome and cosmos and they make a big difference to the garden however garden designer posey gentles suggests that you plan your border by starting with the shrubs i think for a middle-sized garden shrubs give you height and structure and the feeling of the garden going on even if they're deciduous i'm a great fan of deciduous um plants because i think i like to see the sort of bare stems in the winter even if they have just brown stems rather than spectacular corner stems there's still something rather lovely about it evergreens also quite useful for structure like box balls obviously although we don't always want to plant those these days because of various diseases but there are lots of very good little heebies which have nice light color leaves and rosemary i think is is great evergreen i think you want to get away from the very heavy-looking evergreens award-winning garden designer lee burkhill works in the north west of england and he designs gardens he also does online one-hour consultations and lee's youtube channel garden ninja has lots of useful information for gardeners wanting to know more about how to treat the plants in their garden hi my name's lee otherwise known as the garden ninja and i'm an award-winning garden designer and vlogger from the northwest of england and i absolutely love sharing my garden design expertise with new gardeners to help you make your gardens awesome now the first tip is all about colour it's really tempting when you're first putting in a flower bed to start just picking up loads of your favorite plants different colors and hoping that they all go together but more often than not they look a bit pick and mix so my first top tip is to choose your color palette wisely and you've got two main choices you can go for monochromatic where you might take one color say pink and then run different hues of that pink throughout the border meaning it's monochromatic it's soft it's calming it's all uniform or you can go for the more dynamic option of using a colour contrast and there's a good example here behind me you can see the yellow of these rudbeckia which is still flowering in november believe it or not and then you've got the pinks and the purples of the penstemon the verbena and the aster and the yellows and purples dynamically contrast against each other so if you want something really vibrant go for dynamic contrast if you want something calm go for monochromatic on to the second tip the second tip is seasonal interest as i've just mentioned you can see down here if i give a pan around that we've got so much going on even in november now this is a sheltered spot we've got a fence panel here that stops the prevailing wind but if you pick your plants successfully you can have seasons worth of interest now in the spring here we've got loads of spring bulbs we've got some primrose and some geraniums that start to flower sort of april to may and then all these other herbaceous plants start to pop up each month leading to this in november we've still got colour when we get to winter we've got some evergreen shrubs that flank this moongate down here we've got things like viburnum we've got deciduous spiria just loads of interest throughout the year and it's important when you're planning a flowerbed that you use succession planting so as one plant finishes another one takes its place so the final tip is about knowing the ultimate height growth and spread of the plants you're going to choose and it really matters because you can be tempted to squash in loads of plants into a new flower bed and all of a sudden they're out competing each other and it looks like a jumble mess but behind me is a good example of how we can get this kind of meshed together look now i understand the heights and growth habits of these plants and when i space them out i make sure that i'm planting them for the ultimate growth in a year or two not for how they look straight away and the desired effect that i get is that you can see that they all kind of blend together nicely nothing's over competing nothing is being drowned out and it means the flower bed looks full and with a fuller flower bed there's less weeding higher impact and all in all it just looks much more efficient and cohesive than a pick and mix scatter gun approach so hopefully those three top tips will help you be able to plan your flower beds when it comes to your own gardens i've been garden ninja back to alexandria award-winning blogger and garden designer jack wallington is the author of a book called the gardner's book of patterns and the advice he would have for you is to not just think about colour in your garden or which plants but think about the patterns that the plants make pattern is one of the most pleasing things to the eye and many plants have their own natural patterns but also if you look at things like repetition and pattern when you're looking at your border you'll often find it is more successful than you might ever have dreamt i'm jack wellington the landscape designer and i'm really interested in patterns in planting uh so much so that i've written a book called the gardener's book of patterns with the rhs exploring the topic in more detail because i felt i find on a day-to-day basis i use pattern in the same way as i do color or texture or shape and yet we don't talk about pattern in as much detail and in terms of planting my top three tips for incorporating pattern into planting uh one would be look for plants with pattern in them uh this is a good example is an indoor plant obviously there's a houseplant a pantier but it has incredible pattern on it i think in two ways one obviously the dots and from its spines in rows and diagonals and kind of like a grid shape so it's quite like you can see how striking it is it just captures your eyes straight away like um without even looking at it and also the way its pads form in different there's kind of an abstract pattern uh so there's not a set pattern that we might normally recognize it is it forms this abstract shape that because each disc each pad is quite similar um it does create a pattern in itself and of course you could always repeat that again and so looking for plants with patterns in them uh outside obviously this is not a hardy plant so in the uk you'd have to go for something which is hard yet but there are plenty of plants out there with variegation or strong shape to their leaves which create a similar sort of patterns the other thing is is that on that theme of repetition and i think you can use repetition patterns and planting in different ways if you repeat the same pattern so if you have three plants and you repeated the same grouping in exactly the same way it starts to look really formal whereas if you take the same three plants but you whenever you repeat them you change the order slightly that makes it start to feel a little bit more natural a bit more relaxed so because you're using the same plants repeated your eye picks it up and starts to think and recognizes that pattern even though each individual pattern within the wider pattern is different so you can start to loosen things up in that way and in my own designs i'm very much a um i come from the naturalistic school of fort where i want god to look as naturalistic as possible or a fantasy version of that and i use repetition all the time but you wouldn't necessarily notice i kind of i use the same parts dotted around at random intervals so your eye is still subconsciously also across your mind starts to pick up that there is a pattern there as you do see in nature uh but it's not as obvious as a formal garden design with really strict patterns and the third one is thinking about color color is so we know color is important in gardens but pattern is so reliant on color so for instance um you could i was going to refer to my bugs bunny jack top hoodie but it's um probably not the best example it's something like a you think of a checked blanket and that if that blanket were to be red and white checks is really that contrast and color is so uh strong that your eye is drawn against that pattern straight away and the red itself is a really strong color so a really strong contrast makes that pattern really stand out yet if you were to change that red to say a very pale pink um or just off white pink you could still see the checks and it would still be a pattern that captured it wouldn't draw your attention to it in the same way that a red and white check pattern would do so you can play with color and pattern to lift and change the moods from to make your garden more exciting or feel softer and more gentle and so there's a whole world of pattern out there um to be explored in planting so using that same advice and actually dotting plants around with different colors shades and tones can really affect the mood and player of the space in this video i've shown you borders from some wonderful professional gardens and it really helps to go to professional gardens to visit them and to look at how they do their borders but never ever feel bad about the fact your border probably isn't going to look like that because it will still look beautiful plants are tremendously keen on growing and you'll walk out into your garden in may or june you'll think god this is amazing and gardeners learn by trial and error dig away put a plant in they don't all survive don't feel bad about that even professional gardeners find that plants die on them but just give it a go when you're planning flower border don't plan it all you know give yourself a shape and you know certain things you like that you like going together and then allow yourself as the season goes on you know something might not do as well as you thought and then get some bedding and lots of nurseries now do very good bedding so i don't plan this in advance i just go and buy them it's very cheap i get some very good little cliomes and you can just fill in spaces if you're interested in how to grow some really show-stopping plants for your border then check out our playlist flower color which is at the end of this video and if you've enjoyed this do hit like because then i know you'd like to hear more about planting flowers and do subscribe to the middlesized garden youtube channel for more garden tips ideas and inspiration and thank you for watching goodbye

Channel: The Middle-Sized Garden

Views: 83,331

Rating: 4.9628186 out of 5

Keywords: Garden tips, easy gardening, inspirational gardens, small backyard, garden ideas, small garden, middlesized garden, middlesized backyard, backyard garden, gardening advice, small space garden, urban gardening, english garden, gardening, garden, how to garden, gardening for beginners, no till, small garden design, sustainable garden, gardening ideas, flower border, herbaceous border, garden border ideas, garden border plants, planting ideas

Id: 7cyPuZ_YQPA

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 09 2021