Liriope 'Samantha' border plants add a lush, elegant touch with their rich green foliage and delicate blooms, beautifully defining the garden edge.
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Larry Smith and the Riverside Gardens team talk all things pots, plants and pruning in their weekly gardening column.
Purple blooms stand tall, adding a splash of color and charm as stunning border plants.
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With winter team sports wrapping up, our car park was bustling with gardening enthusiasts, eager to embrace the extra leisure time and tend to their green spaces.
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With daylight saving kicking on last Sunday, we should be able to take even more advantage of the extra daylight hours to relax and unwind in the garden after work.
Consider tackling simple projects like adding colourful potted plants to your patio or planting garden edge borders to create a seamless flow between different outdoor spaces.
Border plants are essential garden elements, offering vibrant splashes of colour and creating a cohesive look that ties your entire outdoor space together beautifully.
They can also be used to retain mulch, assist with erosion control on embankments, define traffic flow through the garden, or build layers and depth perception to the planting scheme.
For stunning, high-impact colour borders, consider planting seasonal annuals such as Petunias, Marigolds, Portulaca, Pansies, Violas, and cascading Lobelia.
These are high-maintenance borders but are very rewarding, adding a real highlight of colour for months at a time.
Once finished, they do need to be replaced with the next season's suitable seedlings. So, there is a bit of work involved, but it is well worth the effort.
Low-hedging plants are often used as borders and look very effective if they are maintained.
‘Euonymus Tom Thumb’ is well suited to this type of planting and preforms much better than the English Box ‘Buxus Sempervirens’ in our region.
Tom Thumb handles the extremes of weather much better, is quicker to establish and repair if damaged, holds a consistent dark green colour if looked after, and does not smell when in flower.
They can be trimmed in tight like traditional hedging or left as a loose flowing border.
If you are looking for a more traditional low box hedge, ‘Buxus Microphylla’ or Korean Box would be my choice.
It has a softer fine glossy leaf than English Box, is very dense and compact in habit, and can be kept quite narrow and low with less work.
Korean Box is quicker growing, softer looking, and less pungent in smell when flowing.
‘Escallonia Pink Pixi’ or ‘Escallonia Newport dwarf’ can also be used as trimmed hedges with the added bonus of attractive small pink flowers on and off throughout the year.
They have a fine glossy leaf on red stems and are fast-growing, Untrimmed they will form a domed low shrub to around fifty centimetres high and wide and do best in a full sun position.
These vibrant pink pixie blooms create a stunning border, adding a pop of colour to any garden.
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Strappy foliage plants like ‘Liriope Samantha’ or ‘Liriope Just Right’ look great as a taller garden edge that requires very little work, growing in either sun to part shade.
Their taller clumping structure works well holding mulch and barks back in the garden bed when birds keep scratching around.
A lower growing mounding foliage plant with upright strappy leaves is ‘Dreameria’, these is a larger form of ‘Armeria’ or Sea Thrift.
They have courser leaves and larger flowers that repeat flowering throughout the year. ‘Dreameria’ come in a range of colours from white ‘Dreameria Dream Clouds’, light pink ‘Sweet Dreams’, mid-pink ‘Daydreams’ to dark pink ‘Dreamland’, red ‘Happy Dreams’, and the new dark mauve ‘Vivid Dreams’.
Now, that was enough to make anyone tired.
A border of Dreameria plants brings bursts of pink and purple, framing the garden with soft, cushion-like blooms.
Some of the native grasses make very useful border plants, ‘Lomandra Little Con’, ‘Lomandra Little Pal, Echidna grass ‘Lomandra confertifolia’ all grow to around thirty centimetres high in a clumping habit.
They can take extremely dry periods or short periods of extremely wet waterlogged soils.
Larger growing ‘Lomandra Tanika’ is often used in public spaces for its
hardiness and soft flowing form.
The finer leaf varieties like ‘Lomandra Seascape’ and ‘Lomandra Lime Wave’ add great contrasting colour and form as well as bring movement into the garden with their fine foliage moving in the breeze.
Most of these plants are available in the Garden Centre now, but if not, they will be within a few weeks.
The range of stock arriving in store each week is a huge variety, as the spring weather encourages everything to burst into growth.
Framing the garden with style – border plants add structure and beauty.
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