How to Choose The Right Landscape Plants for Your Garden

Hello. On this week's show we are going to concentrate on planting; how to choose the best plants for your garden. Welcome to the Garden Design Show. It's my mission to desmistify design to make it easier for you to create your dream garden. Properly planning your garden is as vital as properly planning your home. I am Rachel Mathews and I've been a professional, international garden designer for over years. I'm also a best selling author and I teach garden design online. And we'll also be visiting inspiring gardens around Europe and beyond to give you plenty of ideas for your garden. Now this is going to be a three-part episode. We are going to do a case-study garden for one of my most difficult clients, but before we get to that I am going to talk you through what I consider to be the most important parts of planning your planting scheme.

I am going to show you what to avoid and where it usually goes wrong. Then in the second part I am going to show you in detail the garden that we're going to focus on, and then in the third part in a few months time, I'll show you how that garden turns out. So whilst this episode is going to be packed full of planting advice, there is still a quite a good chance that it's going to upset the horticulturist and plant lovers. You might not like what I have to say. Now one of the main names of this episode is to help you avoid and get past the Spring time madness that hits as soon as we get a holiday weekend and the sun's out, if the sun comes out. Even if it doesn't, that urge to suddenly run down the garden center and buy as many plants as you possible can to fill your entire garden. Quickly! You've got to do it this weekend or else. That urge is what garden center owners love, but it doesn't give best results. If you can spend just a little bit of time planning and thinking about what you put in your garden before you rush down the garden center, you'll get so much better results.

How to Choose The Right Landscape Plants for Your Garden

How to Choose The Right Landscape Plants for Your Garden

Now I know that urge is incredibly powerful, you've got to get to the garden center now or they'll sale out. They won't they have lots of plants. They have back-up plants. They have plants everywhere. They won't sell out of plants. So, what do you need to know about your garden? The main things it's an absolute given that if you want success, put the right plant in the right place. It's really simple. Putting a sun-lover in shady area isn't going to work, putting something that needs shade in the sun isn't going to work. But you know this already, but again, if you impulse buy, you'll just say 'Oh I do, I'll look at that- Ill shove that in there.' That's when you waste a heck of a of money. So, research conditions you've got in your garden. Are the areas that you've got gaps in, are they in sun or shade? What type of height do you want? All that type of really basic stuff. So the aim is that you make a list of plants that will grow in your garden and that will suit your needs so it's going to be in your color scheme. Now in part , I'll go in depth sort of how you do that and how you put it down on paper. But, to begin with. Just assess what it is you need before you head off down the garden center.

Now something else that's really critical is allowing enough space for the plants. One of the mistakes that I made when I very first started before I trained as a professional designer, was to cram too much in. In fact, it's very difficult to stop yourself. So if you can read up on the plants you want to buy and find out how big they get over time, that will help you space them. And if you're putting it down on paper, you can put it to scale so you can see just how much space you've allowed for each plant. And again, that really does help save you a lot of time, money and digging things up for a later date. So something really important that I want to discuss with you, and this is the part that often upsets the horticulturist and plant lovers and it did actually upset me when I first sort of came across it is what actually makes a garden-worthy plant? Now if you are a plant lover or horticulturist, you'll have completely different ideas on what makes something garden-worthy than a designer will.

If you think about it, the majority of the time, you're probably viewing your garden from inside the house. So if you've put in a plant that requires a magnifying glass to see its leafs or flowers and you're really not going to be able to see it from the house that well, it's taking up space. So it's not probably a garden-worthy plant. Now I like to think of doing planting scheme as having an orchestra and making music. Now if you've go a small garden or small orchestra, say you've only got nine or ten people in it, you're going to have to be really, really, careful about what musical instruments are in that orchestra. You're going to have to pick the ones that deliver the most.

You know you can't have someone in there if you've only got nine or ten people. You're not going to have someone in there with a triangle going ding. It's just not value, you're not going to get the use of that person. And the same is true with your planting scheme. You need plants that do a lot more than just flower for a week, for example. So if you're going to buy plants, think multifunctional plants. They've gotta do more than one thing. So think phone. You know who has a phone these days, apart from my mother, who is just a phobe. You know, most of all phones play music, they surf the Internet, you can take pictures, video, organize your life.

And if you're really set, you can even have a conversation with them and ask them where you should go and have your dinner. That is what one device does these days. So when it comes to, translates to a plant, you want a plant that perhaps has a green foliage, it flowers, it fruits, its variegated, it has an interesting shape. The more assets that plant has, the more value its going to have in your garden and more interest its going to create. If you've got a really tiny garden, that is even more critical. Now if you've got loads and loads of space, yes then maybe you can have something that does flower for one week or one day or whatever, but if you can get at least ninety-five percent of your garden plants to have more than one use, so its not just about the flowers, its not just about the foliage, they are an interesting shape, or they fruit or they flower, they do something other than just flower you'll create much, much better results when you come to putting them together.

Now if you're a real keen plant enthusiast, and you've read about some amazing plant that was saved from the brink of extinction by a blind man on a three legged mule with frostbite, it was very brave he rescued that plant, its got an amazing story, but you need a magnifying glass to see it, do not put that in your garden- put it in a botanical garden, maybe in a glass house, anywhere, but don't stick it in your garden. That to me doesn't have garden value. Now back to our orchestra example, you do still need some star performers. Even though we picked a lot of multifunctional plants that can play multiple parts within the garden and scheme. You still need to have a few that just have the wow factor. They also need to be multifunctional. So you know the shape is important, etcetera, etcetera, but they are the things that flower for months on end, like lavenders, Nepeta, the catmint. And finally the next part that I think is very, very important is color. Getting the right color schemes. Now I'll demonstrate how to do that in part II. They are the basics that I think you need to get right.

Now there are a lot more things that you can focus on when you sit down and do a planting plan, but those basics will take you a long, long way. Now my parents were very brave when I was and decided I suddenly wanted to do gardens for a living. They let me loose on theirs. And I read one whole book on garden design. Well, I say a whole book, I skipped over boring bits, obviously, like measuring survey and all that boring stuff that you don't need to do. Oh you need to do it. Anyway, they let me loose on their garden and I spent months researching what plants I was going to put in. In those days, you know it was over twenty years ago, there was no Internet. I know, shocking. Well it might have been, but we didn't use it. You had to rely on books and you got a description this big that told you about the plants. And then I tried to plan it from that. And I made a lot of mistakes.

Now it was very fortunate that I made all these mistakes in my parents garden and not a paying client's garden because I learnt a great deal from living with those mistakes. And one of the main mistakes I made was not allowing not enough room and also misjudging the height of plants. That's very difficult because a book will tell you something gets to sixty centimeters height, so it's two foot. But actually that's when it's flowering the actual plant might only be this high. So if you put something in the middle of the border thinking that oh yea that gets to two foot cause you've read it in a book, then you end up having to move things around, and that's what we had to do in my parent's garden. Even though I put all this time and effort into researching it still went wrong.

But thankfully these days we have the Internet, so it's so much easier. You can do a Google image search on plants you want to put in, and you can see for yourself the shape and overall height and the type of thing that that plants does. So you might be wondering if my parents are so brave that they let me design their garden when I wasn't qualified, why are they might most difficult client? Well, whilst they were very brave the first time I designed their garden, because of it, all the mistakes I made and then I moved out and left them to it, I created the day of the triffids for them. And the garden just went bezerk. All of my little experiments. You know I thought it would be a good idea to have a Eucalyptus bush that I'd keep pruned and that would be a nice ever green background for all these lovely plants in front. I forgot to prune it one year and the next year and the next year it was thirty foot high. You know little things like that left them, shall we say, a little traumatized.

So by the time I was qualified. And you know ten to twelve years later knew what I was doing, by the time it came to this garden, they put quite a long list of restraints of things I was and wasn't allowed to do, which, you know, it's understandable. I think they were still traumatized by the first garden I'd done for them. So I wasn't able to design this garden quite as I'd liked. And as I'll show you later on, a few things haven't quite worked out. Because it was my parents I wasn't forceful as I probably would have been had it been with a client. So this was the garden as my parents first moved into the property and the brief with this one was basically to have it as low maintenance as possible with as few plants as possible. So the area that I feel is gone wrong on, is the left hand side by the hedge.

How to Choose The Right Landscape Plants for Your Garden

The border is far too narrow for the planting and this is where I really should have been insistent and made sure they had it larger, but, you know, I didn't and as a result the planting, although we get the hedge tightly clipped to begin with, as you can see in this image here it's gradually started to move over and its forced the plants out. And also with the change in conditions, with the winter flooding, we've lost a lot of things. So they've been stressed in the summer because of the hedge taking all the moisture out. So, and in the winter months where it has been flooding, a lot of stuff has died out. So we've had to re-do, we need to re-do the border. Now this is how the garden looks from the other side. Now this side had a lot more plants because of the shape of the pole and everything. So it was always a bit lopsided for my sort of comfort and taste.

So now we really need to figure out a way, you can see here this was filmed in February. We need to figure out a way to make this border larger and more functional and completely re-do it basically. Then in the next episode, I'll show you precisely what it was that we are in the process of doing to rectify the situation, but I want to hear from you. What do you think is the best way that we can sort out and make this border larger. What would you do if it was your garden? Now in the next episode, I'll show you the solution to that problem we got with this garden with the border being too narrow and I'll also talk you through the processes that I am going to do to create the planting plan for it.

But, if you can't wait until the next episode to find out exactly how, you can buy plants, then do take a look at this month's special offer, which is a combined offer of the five minute plant expert and the plant design formula. Now the five minute plant expert, I'll show you what to look for in order to choose the plants that will grow well in your garden. Now plants will often tell you what conditions they need just by looking at their leaves, so I'll show you some very obvious clues actually once you get into it. And you'll be able to know instinctively which plants are right for your type of garden.

And in the plant design formula, I will show you how to put plants together in combination. Now they way I do it is probably quite counter-intuitive. I don't really focus on the flowers, and I don't real focus that much on the foliage either. So it's probably making you think, what on earth is left? Well, this is far more important than those two elements. If you think about plants, specially in the UK, they are only flowering for set period of times. So if you've chosen a plant purely because of it's flowers, and the rest of the year it's not really doing a great deal, then you're not going to have a very interesting garden for probably other than two or three weeks of the year.

So this formula that I've developed will show you how to combine plants in a way where you really don't have to worry about flowers and the foliage too much and it will help you create a garden that looks good all year. Now if you buy both courses together, they are at half price for the next two days. So do go ahead and check out the website so you don't miss that offer. Now you leave the answers to this week's question by going to successfulgardendesign.com/show So if you've enjoyed this week's show and you think you know people that it will help, do please share it with them. And of course do please leave a review on iTunes or on YouTube, it really helps. The more comments you leave, get the show out there and it's going to help as many people as possible which is my absolute aim with Successful Garden Design. So I look forward to seeing you in the next episode.

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