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A Garden From Scratch: The No-Work Plants I Swear By

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A Garden From Scratch: The No-Work Plants I Swear By

August 7, 2024

In general, flowers are probably less important than form. Some have a fleeting season, perhaps blooming just once before doing nothing for the remaining eleven months of the year (I’m looking at you Iris germanica). Others have an important support act, providing an abundance of flowers or beautiful foliage for the majority of the year.

Yes, I want plants that are beautiful (and that work well together), but I also want them not to be too much trouble. So increasingly, as I’ve realized that you can never really fight the existing conditions in your garden, I just plant more of these low-work plants. If something does well, and needs little to no TLC then it’s very welcome in my garden.

Earlier this week I read a quote from the late plantswoman Beth Chatto, about her much-copied borders in Essex, England. “The point I need to stress,” she wrote in her ground-breaking book Drought-Resistant Planting, “is that copies of my gravel garden will not necessarily be successful or suitable if the principles underlying my planting designs are not understood. When visitors to my garden tell me they have attempted to make a gravel garden but the plants don’t look or behave as they do in mine, they wonder what they have done wrong. I ask ‘What type of soil do you have?’, ‘Very good,’ they reply. The amount of rainfall? ‘Twice what we have here,’ they tell me. I laugh and tell them if I had good soil and adequate rainfall I would not be growing drought-resistant plants.”

Favorite plants should always come with this disclaimer—what works in one garden may not work in another, because the soil, moisture, and conditions will vary immeasurably. Some of my most cherished plants will flourish in all conditions, but some do particularly well because they are especially suited to my garden, which has very free-draining sandy soil and is largely in full sun.

With that in mind, here are the plants I would not be without.

Photography by Clare Coulson.

Salvia nemorosa ‘Caradonna’

Above: I love almost all salvias and they all tend to love my garden, too, so long as I put them in a sunny spot. ‘Caradonna’ has the most intense deep purple flowers that will be smothered in bees for weeks on end. Once it’s finished flowering I cut it back and it will re-flower again, although less prolifically. This is a very upright salvia and looks best softened with hazy grasses or more unruly perennials such as Knautia macedonica.

Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’

Above: Arguably the most prolific, no-trouble plant I grow. Catmint springs into life early in the season, often flowering well before any other herbaceous perennial. It’s healthy, seems to cope with almost any conditions, and is particularly beloved by bees that smother this plant while it’s in flower. As soon as it starts to go over, I cut the whole plant back to a few inches from the base and it will usually regrow and flower again within a few weeks. It’s also very easy to divide and replant and looks fabulous flopping over a pathway.

Verbena bonariensis

Above: All the verbenas work really well in my garden, but the tall, billowing Verbena bonariensis is a brilliant border plant, emerging in mid-summer amongst other perennials and grasses. It’s a favorite of many butterflies and has an extremely long season. It looks wonderful though the autumn and winter as it holds its structure, but it will also happily self-seed so I am normally selective in how much of it I leave standing. Finches love to eat the seeds in winter, too.

Stipa tenuissima

Above: This grass is invasive in some areas, in which case a hazy grass such as Molinia ‘Transparent’ can do a similar job of creating an ethereal blur that sets off other plants and flowers beautifully. But for me Stipa tenuissima behaves well and its seeding is never a problem. I love planting it en masse with colorful perennials such as Verbena rigida or Allium sphaerocephalon.

Digitalis ferruginea ‘Gigantea’

Above: I love all foxgloves, wild or cultivated, especially since they are so popular with bumble bees. But the refined and statuesque spires of Digitalis ferruginea ‘Gigantea’ are outstanding, with such an unusual color of warm yellow tinged with pink. Although they are considered a short-lived perennial, I treat them as biennials in my garden and scatter lots of seed around in late summer in the hope lots more will grow.

Eryngium giganteum

Above: Ideally, I like plants to do interesting things for as long as possible—spiky Eryngiums are exquisitely beautiful as they emerge in early summer in their pale lime incarnation before turning intense metallic shades from silver to electric blue (depending on the type of Eryngium you have) and then slowly fading to golden in autumn.  In frost, they remain delightful as they retain their form right through the winter.

Rosa ‘Blush Noisette’

Above: Choosing a favorite rose is impossible—I have more than a dozen different roses in my garden and I love them all. But this climbing rose with long branches of the prettiest pale pink flowers has a real presence. This is a very healthy, long-flowering rose that has the prettiest pink buds and fine foliage, too. I tend to deadhead through the season to get more flowers, but if you leave the branches intact it also has lovely hips.

Gaura lindheimeri

Above: This gorgeous free-flowering perennial is a fairly new addition to my garden—I started growing it last year from seed. In the height of summer, it is the standout star, falling gracefully over paths or blowing elegantly amidst other flowers such as scabious or verbena. Although other gardeners don’t support it, next year I will be adding sturdy supports to the base as its unruly stems can be quite floppy.

See also:

And for more in the A Garden From Scratch series, see:

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