This time of year is wonderful: plants and wildlife have woken up and it's warm enough for sowing and to plant out beautiful plants, ready for a summer of colour.
It’s tempting to chuck everything willy-nilly into your garden, hoping ‘more is more’, with a jumbled rainbow mix of plants. Sometimes it works well, but you’ll get greater results if you think a little about what you’re planting and where.
And not just with eventual plant heights and whether they’re in sun or shade, but also with regards to complementary colours and shapes. Consider matching themes, tonal contrasts and opposing colours and the overall effect will be much more pleasing to the eye.
Shapes can also complement each other; for example flat achillea heads and poker straight grasses, or blobs of globe thistles and flat daisies. I’ve not got a lot of room to experiment, but I’ve picked medium-sized mid-border perennials to sit below a row of different foxgloves.
Comparing and contrasting are two shades of geum, salmon-pink achillea and geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’ either side.
GN recommends
- Achillea ‘Salmon Beauty’ – Attractive mounds of fern-like foliage topped with flat heads of coral, soft peach and salmon flowers during summer.
- Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’ – Masses of long-flowering single, soft tangerine flowers with scalloped petals held above mid-green leaves.
- Geum ‘Mrs J Bradshaw’ – Tall stems with large, semi-double bright red flowers borne above a mound of soft mid-green leaves.
- Geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’ – Deep lavender-blue, saucer-shaped flowers appear in early summer among divided mid-green leaves.