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Five Fantastic Evergreen Border Plants
I’m dreaming of a…..no, not a white Christmas, but a brand, spanking new home. Of a garden that’s a complete blank canvas. Actually, no….more like a wreck of garden that I can go mad pruning, cutting back and shaping back into a gorgeous oasis. Of French Doors or a large sliding glass wall that I can throw open in warm weather and let the outside in. Of shutters in all shapes and sizes, so that I can get rid of the curtains and have a blissful, clean and crisp look. Of course, all of this is, as I’ve already suggested, a dream. I’m not moving, at the earliest, until this winter, so there’s a whole gardening season ahead of me. However, with family members moving and friends taking the last few days of warmer weather to spruce up their gardens, it has got me thinking about plants.
For many of us, a trip down to the local nursery is a delight. All too often, we fill our trolleys with bright flowers and beautiful blooms with the excitement of getting home and planting. However, after a few months, those petals have withered and disappeared, there hasn’t been the time to deadhead properly, and the garden looks a mess – all over again. And it’s in shopping for plants that the mistake has been made….I’ve learned this the hard way. Instead of being attracted by the glitter and dazzle of flowers, if you want a relatively stress-free and easily maintained patch, it’s evergreens that you need.
I’m going to do a couple of posts about good evergreen plants, and in this first one, I’m concentrating on low growing border and pot plants that’ll look great all year around.
Heucheras (right) – Oh, be still my beating heart. I love these plants. What you see as a pile of leaves, I see as a beautifully patterned specime that will survive around the year, creating great mounds of lush vegetation. Heucheras come in many shapes and sizes, and various varieties thrive in sun or shade. That, in my opinion, makes them a perfect garden plant. They flower in early summer, so there’s a little maintenance chopping off the stalks after they’ve finished blooming. They’re slug and snail resistant too!
Phormiums – Some people love them, others hate them, but I generally regard phormiums as an ideal plant if you want an easy maintenance border or pot. Often called New Zealand flax, phormiums comes in a variety of colours, from pale and striped green leaves, to bright, pinkish red. The arrow-shaped foliage is the perfect contrast to other rounder-leaved garden evergreens, so you can clash both colour and shape. They’re miraculously easy to grow too. One downside is that slugs and snails like to hide away in the core – a place that’s pretty hard to get to. But if you’re ‘evergreening‘ your garden up, you probably won’t note a lot of mollusc damage anyway.
Grasses – Grasses have come in and out of fashion, but I love the fact that they’re available in such a vast array of varieties. Tiny dwarf and slow growing varieties are ideal for pots and the fronts of borders, whilst larger, shrub-sized plants can be used around the year as structural garden plants. To get the best from many varieties, you DO need to chop them right down in winter. However, that’s just once a year compared to lots of deadheading throughout the seasons – I see the benefits!
Ophiopogon (right) – Commonly called ‘Lily Turf’ or ‘Lily Grass’, this plant looks like a grass but, as its name suggests, is actually a lily. It has jet black leaves that last around the year. Grown against green or silver foliage it’s simply stunning. It also works well in pots where you can use pale gravel to really set it off. It’s very slow growing, so don’t expect it to cover a vast area very quickly, but it is a great talking point.
Hebes – If you’ve had to dig out your buddleia because it’s got monstrously leggy (I had to), then hebes are an ideal alternative. You’ll still get the benefit of nectar rich flowers for butterflies, but these treasures are more compact, often slow growing and make ideal evergreen specimens. Like many evergreen plants, they don’t always look their best in winter, but they WILL give a backdrop that’s better than bare and brown stems.
Whilst flowers look nice in the short term, there’s generally far more maintenance involved than if you’re growing shrubs and greenery. And, if you want a garden to look lush and vibrant around the year with very little effort, I’d definitely consider using evergreen plants that provide a constant backdrop of foliage.
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