Here are 5 top insider tips Choose the best plants for your garden.
I visited multi-award-winning nursery Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants to ask Rosy Hardy what the experts look for when buying plants.
Rosy also has a YouTube channel all about plants, Rosy Hardy Gardening.
Award-winning plant breeder Rosy Hardy tells you how to choose the best plants for your garden
You can watch the interview with Rosy Hardy in the video here.
Choose the best plants by looking at the base
“Everyone is always attracted to the color of flowers,” says Rosy.
“But it’s more important to look for strong, healthy growth at the base of the plant.” There should be a piece of root sticking out of the soil, showing that it’s not a smaller plant that just went into a larger pot was planted.”
(My post on how to reduce the cost of planting a bed received several comments from people who worked in nurseries saying that some “2L” plants were actually 9cm plants in 2L pots! )
And Rosy added: If you know you’re going to a reputable nursery where you can rely on good labeling and plant quality, then you can buy plants that are still in the bud.
Otherwise, buying plants that are already in bloom means you know what you’re getting.
Look at the basal leaf of the plant to see if it is healthy!
Make sure you know how much sun or shade the plant needs
You need to know how much sun or shade your bed has, says Rosy. “A west-facing border is the easiest place to grow plants because there’s a lot of light, but it’s gentle.”
If your bed is sunny or shady, make sure you buy plants that want to grow in sunny or shady locations!
And how is your soil? For example, if you have very sandy soil or very heavy clay soil, there are certain plants that are best suited to this type of soil.
That’s one reason it’s a good idea to buy plants grown at a nursery near you, rather than plants mass-produced in pots far away.
And if you buy from a local nursery, you can also learn more about the plants. The people who work there are usually very knowledgeable about the plants they sell and grow.
Check whether your bed is sunny or shady.
Find out when the plant blooms and how long it blooms for
Some flowers bloom for months (for good examples, see this post on 6 Perennials That Bloom All Summer Long). However, flowering may be temporarily interrupted.
Other flowers bloom particularly intensively at a certain time.
When selecting the best plants for a big bloom at any given time, Rosy says, ask yourself, “What will come of this?”
Find out when the plant blooms and how long it blooms for. Plan what will happen afterward.
Contrasting flower and leaf shapes
Rosy says that when you have an entire bed full of the same shaped flowers, it looks a bit boring – no matter how pretty the flowers themselves are.
“When buying plants, pay attention to contrasts. For example, combine a round flower with a lace,” she says. Plant a group of plants with rounded flowers or leaves with a group of spiky plants.
And you can plant taller plants in the front. You don’t have to stick to the traditional way of creating a border with larger plants at the back, medium-sized plants in the middle, and smaller ones at the front.
A plant like Verbena bonariensis, for example, has bright lavender flowers at the top of a tall, thin stem. If you plant it at the front of a bed, you can see through it to the plants behind it. These are what Rosy calls “transparent plants.”
Choose plants with contrasting leaf or flower shapes, textures, or colors.
Choose the best plants – and then plant them well!
First, check the label to see how wide the plant will grow. There has to be so much space in the edge.
If you don’t have this information, Rosy suggests holding two plants in both hands, about shoulder-width apart. This distance should be sufficient for most perennials.
If you don’t have a tape measure, plant most perennials about shoulder-width apart. Fill the gaps with annual or biennial plants, as they do not compete for space in the same way.
It takes 1-3 years for these perennials to fill their designated space. But you don’t need bare soil. Rosie says you can plant annuals and biennials to fill in the gaps.
To clarify, a perennial is a plant that stays in your bed for three years or longer.
An annual is a plant that grows from seed, flowers, and dies within a year. A biennial does the same thing in 2 years.
Annual and biennial plants cannot compete with perennial plants because they die anyway. So you can add annuals and biennials to fill in the gaps between perennials as they grow.
Good annuals for borders include cosmos, snapdragons, marigolds and cleomes. Good two-year-olds include foxgloves and wallflowers.
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