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How to Plan for Year Round Interest
Year round interest is one of the great gardening pursuits. Make tours of your garden throughout the seasons, take pictures and make notes to remind you of what needs improving. It is possible to have a garden that has something of interest every day of the year - not necessarily flowers, they are a bonus. The bones or underpinning of your garden is what really matters. This is what is meant by backbone of shrubs. Hedges, even deciduous ones, add permanent structure to your garden; walls, pergolas, arches, buildings all have year round garden presence.
It helps to make a planting plan to check that you have covered all seasons with your choice of plants. In small gardens, choose trees with more than one season of interest - for instance attractive summer leaves and berries in autumn. When selecting shrubs, include a good proportion of evergreens for year round colour and interest - aim for about a half of the total. Different deciduous shrubs add interest in different seasons. There are many evergreen plants, and a good proportion have attractive seedheads for autumn and winter. Finally, bulbs add seasonal highlights - include some which flower in each of the seasons.
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Plants; spade; fork; space in your garden or a border; trowel; organic material; watering can or hose
Optional: bark, cocoa shells or gravel to mulch the area; organic fertiliser.
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Prepare the area. You may want to regroup some existing plants. Move these plants to a new site. Dig over the border before replanting. Make a sketch of the effect you are trying to create. Choose you plants - look at the suggestions below, check out the related workshops and Greenfingers Plantfinder database.
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Start at the back of the border or area and move forward. Plant any climbers, trees and your backbone of shrubs. Water each individual plant in as you plant it. Then move on to filling in the spaces with medium range and lower growing plants. Underplant low growing herbaceous plants with groups of bulbs - spring bulbs are available to be planted in autumn; autumn bulbs are planted in spring. Remember to label bulbs to remind you what's where.
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When you have finished, water the whole border well. Then add a 5 cm layer of decorative bark mulch, cocoa shells, or gravel to the area. Then add a 5 cm layer of decorative bark mulch, gravel or cocoa shells to the area. This will help to retain moisture around the plants and suppress annual weed seeds, which get disturbed as the soil is cultivated. It also helps to show off your plants. Make sure that new planting does not dry out completely during warm, dry spells.
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Start the year with snowdrops and other early bulbs |
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Daffodils will die down before summer flowers come out |
Underplant summer shrubs with spring plants |
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