Inspiration for dense/flowering new border

Hello,

Well It's been about a year since I first posted looking for advice about our mortally wounded leylandii. . . and to be honest, it's taken most of that time to try to deal with that!

Now able to do some nicer things, having also removed all the (several tons...) slabs/AstroTurf/gravel/membrane etc.

The other evening I made a little space for a new border - picture attached. It's 3.3m long. The aim is to create a dense border with, eventually, lots of flowers for the bees and butterflies. I'd hope to grow and keep it to about 2m tall. Only plant that I have for it just now is a camelia, which I think will go in the middle.

I imagine rhododendrons will be good to go with this, but I'm bewildered at the number of varieties. Dwarfs likely too small and too slow growing. I'm also open to non-rhododendron ideas!

I'm also a little stumped in terms of spacing - with smaller plants I imagine maybe 2 on each side of the camelia, but with larger rhododendrons I'd imagine 1 would be enough.

Many thanks for any ideas!

 

You may find this book (which our friend Redwing recommended to me a few months ago) useful when it comes to ideas for pollinator-friendly plants. Packs an awful lot of information into 288 pages and I refer to it almost daily!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/RSPB-Garde...+wildlife+adrian+thomas&qid=1583061044&sr=8-1

I also started a thread about the best perennial plants for butterflies in September and got many useful and informative replies, perhaps you'll find some inspiration reading that.

Best Perennial Plants For Butterflies

Nick

 

Hi strangloop
I hate to break it to you but that border not wide enough for large shrub plants especially large rhodes ( except for vertical growing plant eg Taxus fastigiata - sambuscus black tower ) , the dwarf rhodes / azaleas would be fine . Have you checked the PH rhodes /azaleas require acidic soil, camellia do as well but are normally fine in neutral PH soil.

 

Agree with @Perki , a wider border will make planting much easier. A proper edging will help with mowing, I have cheapy plastic one that comes up to grass root level. It keeps (more or less) grass on the lawn side and plants on the bed side.

For the plants, are you looking for a year around interest, or mostly warmer season flowers? Dwarf Buddleyas are great and will bloom all summer if deadheaded, but will not do much over the winter. Rosa Rugosa is unbeatable for healthy, strong rose with pretty, fragrant flowers and lovely hips lasting as long as the birds let them.

Now I'm totally biased, but I just received JParker's catalogue in the post and fell in love with hedging roses Honestly, how good is this?



For a narrow bed like this you can go wild and wildlife friendly, or a mass planting of the same plant for a feature. Mass planting will only be stunning when in season, so mixed planting might be a better option unless you have a generously sized garden to provide interest at other times.

 

Looks like a well prepared planting area strangeloop but you would probably be better off to avoid the larger shrubs which as mentioned already might get too big and be more work to keep in the space available. Penstemmon and potentilla would be two long flowering small shrubs you might look into and they can be seen in this video clip from my own garden. There is also the option to fill the gaps between the shrubs with more short lived flowers like pot marigolds and erysimum bowles mauve while the shrubs you choose are getting bigger and eventually filling up the space. Some evergreen shrubs with nice leaf colour might also be useful in providing colour when other plants are not flowering.

 

Thank you everyone for the thoughts and suggestions. I'll take a little time to look into all of the plants mentioned and read through the existing thread. And maybe buy that book!

The overall situation with our garden is that there was nothing at all living in it when we moved in, and it's taken me quite some time to just get to the point where I can even consider growing anything at all. The upshot is that I have an almost blank canvas and lots of places to make beds, borders, etc of various sizes.

I was thinking that the border in the picture might be a little too small but fortunately it's a work in progress and I've got plenty of scope to make it a little bigger. I'm also working on raising it up a bit because we have a drainage problem. . . that's quite a headache in itself!

I need to get a pH meter I think, but in the meantime I've just been using bags of ericaceous mix to go around the camellia, and the couple of rhododendrons and azaleas I've got in the back garden. The soil across most of our plot (which I only got to after digging up ~11 tons of gravel and sand + over 100 slabs) is *very* heavy/dense/non-draining clay. . .

Thanks again!