A Happy Easter to everyone this weekend, and I hope you’ll find time to get out into the garden. Thank you for being part of this weekly journal in which I’ll share my gardening year with you. If you’re new to this, you’ll find out more about me and about what happens week by week here. Continued below is the latest in a series of posts on creating a planting scheme for a new border, with my thoughts on adding annuals to the scheme - especially useful for a young herbaceous border before the plants have knitted together. You’ll find a list of my favourite annuals to plant in borders below.
If you’re planting a new border this season you have to be prepared for it to look a bit bare in its first and even second year. This isn’t the Chelsea Flower Show, this is real life, and conjuring up instant gardens is not realistic. OK these days you can buy huge readymade topiary specimens and have them shipped in from Holland if you choose, but planting a border cheek by jowl to give instant gratification won’t work in the long term. As I mentioned last week, plants need ample space to spread out and establish properly, and cramming them in means you will quickly lose the less dominant plants.
But if you’re by nature an impatient person (and I am) you can use annual flowers to fill those niggling bare patches of soil to make your border look incredible in a very short space of time. In fact whether your border is new or established, there are always gaps that can be filled with annuals, giving you the opportunity to increase the species diversity in your garden and the chance to try out different flower varieties. For me, this is a huge part of the fun of gardening each spring: trying new annuals from seed for both pots and borders.
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