Planning Those Herbaceous Borders...

Press, Volume C, Issue 29625, 22 September 1961, Page 6

Planning Those Herbaceous Borders...

The best arrangements of plants, be they shrubs, annuals, perennials or what you will, are not achieved easily. There is no royal road to success in border planning, and most good borders are the result of nothing but hard work—mental hard work, as well as physical. Flow do you go about it?

First and foremost, you must know the characters of the various plants you are going to use. Their flowering season, height, colour, cultural requirements and so on. These are the basic bricks from which your border is constructed, and ufiless you know these aspects a good border will be the result of chance, not judgment. If friends give you plants, make sure they give you the name as well. Then you can look up the characters of the plant concerned, if you don't know it already. If you accept an unknown plant, you would be foolish to plant it in either an established or a projected border without more information It could be too tall, the wrong colour for blending, have different cultural requirements to your existing plants, and so on. Any one of the aspects could lead to trouble. Plant it up in a "reserve garden," and note the characters of the plant when it flowers You can then use it in a future season.

Cultural requirements are important If you have a sunny, dry border you would succeed with plants such as bearded iris, nepeta. cents urea, agapanthus, red hot pokers, dieramas. gaillardias. geum, verbena, armeria. watsonia. etc., but you would be foolish to try astilbes. hosta, monarda, lobelia, cardinalis, lythrum, senecio clivorum, etc. These all require a moist soil for best results In the same way it would not be wise to mix plants needing frequent division, such as helenium, perennial aster, solidago and iris, with those which prefer to be planted and left alone—peonies, winter roses, dictamnus and dieramas. These examples could be extended —vigorous growers and weak growers, acid soils or limy soils, wind tolerators and non-tolerators: they are very important Here, a good book is most useful, and is invaluable to extend your knowledge, too. Harrison's “Handbook of Bulbs and Perennials for the Southern Hemisphere" can be well recommended for this purpose.

But plant characters are important, too. Plants which flower early in the season should be mingled with those which flower later on, unless you are attempting a spring/ autumn border or a single season border. And if you do mingle them, then the right plants must be chosen as associates. Oriental poppy flowers early and dies down early, and unless you plant a spreading later-flowerer in front of it you get a blank spot further on in the season. Gypsophila or. Statice latifolia would help out here. We have all seen the results of planting tall growers in front of short ones. The ultimate height should be known so that plants may be roughly graded from front to back. Dwarf perennial asters, catmint, veronica, geums. armeria, bergonia. erigeron stokesia and lambsear are all good front-row plants, but the height to which the border is graded up depends primarily upon its width, so that both are in proportion. However, a few taller growers here and there, as long as they don’t overpower the scheme, can help to avoid monotony resulting from tooeven grading. Colour associations are r&ther personal. My own preference is for blended pastel shades with a few contrasts of colour, but that doesn't mean that it is any better than a surrealistic galaxy of battling colours. Let one colour be a dominant and associate • the others to it; you will produce a much more unified effect.

Finally, having cleared your mind on all these preliminary matters you can set to work and plan your border on a sheet of paper. Check with the nurseries on their stocks; sound your friends on the divisions they will let you have. List tha plants you can choose from and then work out the best arrangement. Draw the border dimensions on squared paper, and work out associations and sizes of clumps. Don't use too small a group—threes or fives produce much better results if the border is big enough. In the front rank a clump could be two or three feet across; in the back, four or five feet would not be too big in a wide border. Plan and plant without delay. Then be prepared to note any mistakes during the coming season so that you can put real polish on your efforts. It’s worth it