Planting Perennials for Autumn Colour | Starting a new shade border

Hello and welcome back to the garden and I'm just cleaning off these spent blooms Cutting some back on this Phlox David. It's suffering with the weather that we're having this year. We've had lots of wind, lots of dry days and very little rain which is something that we're not used to. We normally have a lot more rain this time of year but climate change. One year it's very wet and this year it's very dry but one thing I hate to see are brown spent blooms on flowers here in the White Garden because it's the White Garden and it does take a little bit more, requires a little bit more care and attention than I normally would give other places in the garden. But today's video is all about filling in those gaps in the borders. I've got quite a few in the hot border which we'll go to next and I've also got a new project that I want to start but first I do have one plant that I want to add to the borders here in the White Garden so let me go and get that. Yes the new plant is another hydrangea and this is a new one to me. This is Hydrangea Phantom. I've never heard of this till I actually saw it in the garden centre and I just fell in love with it. It's a Paniculata hydrangea and apparently I've read, don't quote me on this, it has one of the largest panicle flowers of all of this type of hydrangea. They open up lime green pretty much like a limelight hydrangea then they turn to white and this one here is pretty much nearly white now as is this one and then in the autumn time they turn a blush colour which I'm looking forward to see and I don't mind that here in the White Garden because by that time all of the Annabelle hydrangeas will have started to turn brown so hopefully this will turn a nice colour but we'll see in the autumn. It's a plant for the back of the border, grows to about five to six feet in height, spread even bigger five to seven feet in spread so it's definitely one for the back of the border. I've added it in a pot for this year because I'm not quite sure yet where I'm going to add it. I've got a few places in mind but where I'm going to stand it for this summer, for the rest of the summer, the autumn is in one of the new borders behind here so I'll need to get a bit help to move it in position because it's very heavy. What do you think? It's a good addition isn't it? Long term I'd love to leave it here but I don't think this particular spot gets enough sunshine. It requires full sun to partial shade and I just think it will probably struggle to flower as well here. I'll see, I'll think about it over the winter but it really does add a sense of drama here to the back of this border. Anyhow, now moving on to the hot border where I've got some plants to cut back and some new perennials to add. Right along the front of this border I have Alchemella mollus and Nepeta all of which now requires a haircut. It's pretty dead, all of the flowers have gone brown and it's not a good look so the first job is to get in amongst all of the other perennials and cut this back and then hopefully I'll have space to add something else. Just before I start cutting back the Alchemella mollus, I'm also pulling out these spent flowers from the Alstroemeria and how you cut these back, you don't actually cut them with shears or scissors or whatever you want to use, you just pull it and it comes out very easily and by pulling it out it also encourages the the clump to produce more flowers and it's such an easy quick job to do. So hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll have some more of these lovely orange flowers. Cutting back this type of perennial is very easy. There's no finesse to it, it's just grabbing the spent flower spikes right down to the clump and cutting through and in about two weeks time I'll have a lovely new flush of leaves on these clumps. In fact I can see them coming through already. So it's a week later from when I cut back all of the perennials. We've had a mini heat wave here in the UK and the quarry garden isn't on irrigation so I couldn't chance putting all of these plants in the ground because it was too hot. We're just tipping into the 90s and that's not something we get very often here so I've kept the plants stored away in the shade and I've watered them every day but the first one that I put in earlier today is this Rebecca Goldstrom and it's very pretty and I have it behind me further on down the border and also at the other end. Originally when I designed this garden it was designed around these grasses. I had a swoop all the way through the middle of this border but I've lost quite a few over the years and in the same time I seem to have lost some of the perennials so I'm now putting back what I originally had. This is a plant for the front to the middle of the border I would say. Grows anything up to two and a half to three feet max. I wouldn't say it would grow higher than that and it can spread quite far, about two feet if you're lucky, maybe even more if it's got the right conditions. So hopefully in the next year or two it'll spread out and give me a bigger clump. So that's the first one. Big gap in the front here, don't know yet what I'm going to add. I'm thinking either Coriopsis to match the one on the other side or possibly an Achillia. I'm leaning more towards the Achillias but behind me I've got some Coriopsis to add so let me go and get those. The Coriopsis that I've picked for this spot is Uptick Gold Bronze and it's got yellow, orange, more orange to red flowers. Red in the main sort of flower area but it's fringed all the way around with I would say, yes yellow I would say, but it's particularly pretty and as with these Uptick series of Coriopsis, they grow anything from about 30 to 35 centimetres, around about a foot in height and spread. But they're perennial, come back every year. When they're established they're very drought resistant. So maybe that's just as well, given how our climates are all changing. But it's a great plant for a hot border and similarly for autumn colour, very pretty for autumn colour. So I've got a few of these to add around this spot and the bees have already found it. So leaving the hot border behind in the sunshine, let's wander down here to where the next couple of projects will be. One for today and one for the next video. Anyone that's watched the channel for a while will recognise this shade border that I started to develop, I think it was about two years ago and it's pretty much complete now. The star this time of year, heading towards the end of August, is this Astilbe which is Delft lace and it's really pretty and it's flowering late, mainly because I think it's in the shade here. It does have filtered light at different times during the day, early morning, late evening, but I think that's probably why it's flowering so late when most of the other Astilbes are long finished flowering. If you want a colour, if you want a bedding or an annual plant for shade, this Begonia, this is shades of pink, beautiful. Some of the few flowering plants that I can actually add to this area. Around the back here you have another developed area which is Pulmonaria and the hardy Cyclamen. The bigger of the two projects down this area is to change this or to develop this into a shade border and now it has the odd fern, some shrubs and lots of weeds. The focus of today's project is to do something with this area, this new border which is the border that's running right down to the bottom of the quarry, to the lower quarry. I've cleared this section, it does have lots of spring bulbs in it, so whatever I do here I'll come across those. But we all have areas that we want to hide things away and this is mine. You can see all the different paraphernalia, there's soil piles, leaf mold piles, pots, ladders, everything. There's a long run of gravel, this is the gravel that I removed from the white garden. I'm going to make a path in there just to tidy that section up. I've got some stones but this is the start of the border around this, what I call my very mini stumpy area. I added some ferns a few years ago, these are just three off cuts from a tree limb that were too heavy to move and this is where I want to start creating something out of nothing. Okay, I've tidied up the area, I've stored the ladders away, I'm left with these wooden rails and I'm just thinking this through. I may use them to edge the path and it'll contain the gravel. The only thing is that there's tree roots everywhere around here from all these deciduous trees so fixing them might be a problem. So the better solution may be to use stone to retain the gravel. I'll have to think about that one, see how easy it is and I'll need help with that one. But first of all, let's edge the border. Let me get rid of this tarpaulin, edge the border and we can add some plants. I think the easiest thing before I start planting is to mark out where the path will begin and that's mainly because I'll know where to add the plants. So I think that's a good starting point. The path has to be wide enough to get the wheelbarrow in because that's the leaf mold pile and soil piles at the top so I'll need access to them all the time. So I've brought some stone around, I've got plenty more. I see an old quarry, never short of stone lying around. But if I mark what I think is this side of the path and we'll see what that looks like. I've decided to go with stone. I think it's going to be an easier job not laying landscape fabric or anything like that because you can see from the path there's no weeds ever grow here. It's so dry under all of these trees and there is no soil for anything to really cultivate in. So I'm just going to spread the gravel out and I need an awful lot more stone to take me all the way up to the top but at least this will give me an idea next to the border of what it's all going to end up like. I think the path is going to look quite good up the back of this. This is the back of the hot board obviously in case you hadn't realized. It does go right through the back out the other end but there is the leaf mold pile in the way. Whether I'll move that to somewhere else I don't know. I may do so this path may take you all the way through to the back to the other side eventually. I haven't decided on that yet. I also haven't decided how I'm going to edge the back of this very small section of this border. I'm going to play around with stones once I've retrieved them from the lower quarry. But today the next job is to add some plants just to start building this space up and the plant the first plant that I'm adding is a hugarella and if you haven't used these before or heard of these this is the cross between a tiarella which I use quite often down the lower quarry because I love shade and a hookera. Hookeras I love but I just can't get them to come back from one year to the next in the borders. In pots I can but not in the border. So this is the cross and I have used this one before and it's worked for me and it's come back for a few seasons now so I'm quite happy quite confident that this will work here. I do like center pot shade maybe pushing the envelope here because it's a little bit more shaded most of the day but I'm going to give it a go and this one is pink revolution and I think it's incredibly pretty and it is height for 40 to 50 centimeters so it's quite small I don't think it's going to go much bigger than that. The spread may be double that but the actual height will more or less stay the same as what it is now growing in the pot which is about a foot just over a foot in height. To add to the front of this border I have quite a few different choices. I've got a few ferns from the winter wall baskets that I've just been taking apart so I can add more ferns. I've got self-seeded, these are all in trays by the way trays of water, self-seeded pulmonaria that I've dug out, this is trevious fountain, some nice leaf patterns on that one. I've got the black mondew grass again these are all being dug out of pots waiting to be put into the ground somewhere and I've also got a bucket full of grasses again these were in a pot off last winter and it's time for them to be planted out so I could use those or the black mondew grass which is my favourite but it's quite a dark spot so do I go with that? Do I go with the other grass? Do I use both? I've also got some of the hardy cyclamen now this is not to be confused with the cyclamen that's everywhere in the garden centres at this time of year. Those are not hardy, those are what the florists use in displays and once they're hit by the frost they will die but this this will come back year after year. I've got some I think I showed earlier on the video behind the bench, lovely white ones but in this section here I've got the choice of using these pink ones. Now it's took me a while to work out the layout, such a tiny space and it took me ages to figure it out but I think I've got there and I've decided on the black mondew grass instead of the carex the opipogium grass because my reasoning behind that decision, the veins going through the hookarella, lovely black veining which I think matches to the black mondew grass so all I need to do now is plant them. Finishing touches, well that's it another video finished another section of the garden complete. I'll turn the camera around so you can see the planting close up because I'm conscious of the fact it's quite dark under all of these deciduous trees. You can see the sun behind me but it never quite reaches this spot but thanks for watching and I'll see you all soon.