The herbaceous border is the ultimate demonstration of gardening skill: a masterpiece of juxtaposed shapes, colours and textures, all reaching a climax in the summer months. It has humble origins in cottage gardens, where flowers for cutting rubbed along with vegetables, but the herbaceous border was dragged, Eliza Doolittle-style, into horticultural high fashion by William Robinson and his 1883 book The English Flower Garden. He proposed moving away from the vogue carpet bedding towards a looser, more natural planting.
The style was taken up in the gardens of grand country houses and suburban villas alike, and has been a mainstay of British gardens ever since, mainly because a good one is such a very lovely thing. See a herbaceous border in full swing and you would imagine botanical knowledge, planting skill and an excellent design eye would be needed to pull it off with aplomb.
In fact, it’s not so very tricky – but it is easy to see why a beginner or a less confident gardener might feel daunted by the grand history of the border. There is a certain level of knowhow about habits and flowering times that is handy, if not essential, if you are going to plan a border and plant it all up at once. You don’t have to do it this way, of course: you can just pick a colour theme, start planting, and fill in with matching and contrasting plants as the season and the years go on. But there is a great deal of satisfaction to be had from having a plan laid out in front of you and getting all the plants into the ground at once. At the explosive rate herbaceous perennials grow, you could plan today, plant tomorrow and have a fully flowering border within months.
Luckily there are several ways in which you can cheat at the planning and creation stage if you haven’t spent five years learning at the knee of the head gardener of a country house estate.
Online guidance
Several sites will give you a good starting point and nudge you in the right direction if you want to have a go at planning your own border. The obvious place to begin is the Royal Horticultural Society’s website. It provides a list of planting styles (contemporary, formal, wildlife-friendly and so on) and then a list of plants that will help you to create that style. The Burncoose Nurseries website offers a similar service, though it focuses less on borders and more on designing whole gardens. But within each of the planting styles it suggests, it lists 12 suitable plants and encourages you to have a go at designing with them. The beauty here is that you can then click on the link to each plant, pop it into a basket and, when you are finished, buy a whole border’s worth.
Ready-made plans
For a little more hand-holding, turn to companies that have created ready-planned borders. Garden On A Roll is one that really does everything bar the digging: not only has it designed borders, it has printed the designs on to biodegradable paper, to be laid on the earth and planted through. Cover the paper with mulch and it will soon rot away. It is an excellent way to be guided through the planting process, though the choice of colours and themes is not particularly wide. Prices start at £65 for two metres.
Slightly more inspiring to my eyes is the range of border designs from Crocus, which includes such tempting fare as Soft Summer, Azure and Gold, and Lady Marmalade, as well as sensible designs for particular environments, including Shady Sanctuary (a magical-looking scheme featuring wild ginger, oak-leaved hydrangea, ostrich fern and lily of the valley), Woodland Edge and Sun Lovers.
But pipping these has to be the new Beth Chatto Gardens Collection, designed by the revered plantswoman to help unconfident gardeners put together borders in tricky areas. Chatto is famous for her beautiful pioneering gardens built on parched gravel and boggy ditches, and so it is just right that she has focused on trouble zones, with collections of drought-resistant plants, moisture and shade lovers. They will help you do right by your awkward spots, and in style.
Call in the designers
If even these options worry you, consider getting in touch with a garden designer. They don’t only redesign whole plots: many will happily draw up a planting plan designed around your own border shapes and garden conditions. By going down this route, you can include favourite plants and draw on the designer’s experience in finding others to complement them. Look on the Society of Garden Designers’ website to find one near you, or Google a local designer and ask to see photographs of their borders in flower for reassurance and inspiration. Whichever way you go about it, a lack of confidence in choosing your own plants is really no reason to deny yourself a border bursting with colour this summer.
Herbaceous perennials: the basics
A herbaceous perennial is a hardy plant that dies down in autumn, but only to its roots. These stay alive through winter, and in spring the plant starts into life again. It will put on a huge amount of healthy, fresh growth from these raring-to-go roots in a season, so will very quickly reach flowering size from nothing.
It will be in situ for years, so if there are any perennial weeds in the ground when you plant, they can become a real problem. Make sure you clear the ground completely first, taking care to remove all traces of roots.
Perennials’ quick and lusty growth means they are hungry plants and can deplete the soil quickly, so enrich it with compost or well-rotted manure before planting, then feed every spring with chicken manure pellets or similar. After a few years, flowering can decrease, but you can rejuvenate the plants by digging them up, splitting them and replanting. Every winter the foliage will die down, leaving dead stems behind. Keep these in place over winter for small insects to use as homes, then cut down in spring in time for the flush of new growth.
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