Christmas and New Year frequently bring lists of favourite flowers, trees, gardening books. We thought a blog of Plews Favourite Garden Plants 2013, chosen with your garden in mind by Plews Team members would be helpful in giving you some planting design inspiration for 2014.
Zinnia
Chosen by Hari, who loves the colour red. Bedding plants are often given a hard time by ‘proper’ gardeners and garden designers. Their continued popularity as seasonal garden plants for most of the British public would suggest that they have a place in our gardens.
For some of our design and regular clients we plant up seasonal containers. Box cones surrounded by delicate white euphorbia and bright red zinnia looked stunning on a shady verandah this year
Nepeta cataria (catnip)
Chosen by Lucy as she is a cat lover, Nepeta cataria is the ‘true‘catnip or catmint. This herbaceous perennial has purple stems and aromatic foliage – and is very popular with cats as a snack between meals, so it needs to be put in as a larger plant if there are cats around. The white flowers are small and it is the foliage which provides the foil for other flowers.
Pink shrub rose
Chosen by James with his late grandfather in mind, but it’s not just the older generation who can appreciate the delicate scent and long flowering season of the newer shrub roses. They quite rightly remain one of the world’s most popular garden plants. Rosa ‘Constance spry’ and Rosa ‘Alnwick’ are both popular with our clients.
Ginger Rosemary
Chosen by Nathan, who finds this a more useful cooking herb than the usual Rosmarinus officianalis. The volatile oils in rosemary make it a very pungent herb and a popular one, but sometimes a more subtle effect is required which is where the ginger rosemary becomes so useful.
Pale green evergreen foliage and an upright form make ginger rosemary a decorative and culinary addition to the smaller garden.
Pyracantha
Chosen by Chris, Plews’ Employee of the Year 2013, as although the spines on the stems are extremely sharp, this is one of pyracantha’s positive attributes as well as a negative one. Kept closely trimmed it makes a decorative wall shrub, with red, yellow or orange berries giving a splash of colour during the autumn and winter months. The white flowers in spring are slightly scented. But as anyone who has got too close to a pyracantha will know, those sharp spines make an excellent deterrent, which is why it’s one of our first choices for a boundary hedge where security is an issue.
Heuchera ‘southern comfort’
Chosen by Dan as he liked the range of colours in the foliage of a single plant; although he found the name entertaining too. Heuchera make useful ground cover garden plants and the choice of foliage colour and leaf shape in the different varieties enable us to use it in different styles of planting schemes where low maintenance is a requirement.
Lonicera x purpusii
Chosen by Marie for its scent in the depths of winter; the winter flowering honeysuckle is one of those shrubs that you should find space for. Not very exciting for most of the year, it comes into its own as a pollinator for winter insects, which is why the scent is so strong, as there are fewer insects around in the winter garden. Flowering stems brought into the house will fill the room with a delicious scent on Christmas Day and throughout January.
Cornus sanguinea ‘midwinter fire’ (dogwood)
Chosen by Sharpe. Okay, so maybe we chose it for him, but Cornus, or dogwood, is an excellent shrub for winter interest. Planted with spring flowering bulbs and summer herbaceous perennials in front, you suddenly have a seasonally changing border of interesting garden plants. Be sure to prune the dogwood hard in late March, down to three buds, so that fresh new colourful stems are grown ready for the following winter.
Holly (Ilex)
Chosen by Liam, who, like Nathan, has various tree and chainsaw qualifications. Holly, Ilex aquifolium, is a very useful evergreen to have in the garden. Like pyracantha it can be used as a boundary hedge to dissuade intruders, but it’s also excellent for encouraging wild life into the garden, providing both spring nesting space and winter food supply.
Sempervirens arachnoideum
Our other Liam is a bit new to have a favourite garden plant but he quite liked the planting design we did which included a range of hardy evergreen succulents in a custom designed and built planting trough. So we’ve included the ’spider houseleek’.
So there you have it, the Plews Garden Design Team’s favourite garden plants of 2013. Happy New Year from us all!
So there you have it, the Plews Team’s favourite garden plants of 2013. Happy New Year from us all!
This is one of the earlier Plews blogs, which grew from a fortnightly ‘Cuttings’ section on the website 2008 -2011
Plews Garden Design (the business) began in 2001
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