Border gardens are a popular way to create vibrant landscape features around just about any size property. With a mix of flowering perennials in a border, you can enjoy a display of brilliant blooms from spring through fall. Getting started is easy with a few simple ideas and tips.
What is a Border Garden
Buildings, walls, walkways, and other permanent structures provide a solid frame for perennials in bloom. Fill the spaces in front of or around them with plants of different colors, shapes, sizes, textures, habits, and flowering times and you have a border garden. The best choices for border perennials depend on your conditions but you have lots of options for almost any circumstances. A border garden may be several feet wide or as narrow as 12 to 18 inches. The shape of a border garden can vary, too, so it can fit into the area you have available.
Best Choices for Border Perennials
Border gardens may have small trees or shrubs, but herbaceous perennials typically make up the majority of plants. Herbaceous perennials are plants that die back to the ground in cold weather and come up again and flower every season. You can choose from dozens of perennials to find the right blend for you. As you consider the options, keep these hints in mind.
- Seasonal Bloom: Look for types that flower in early spring to midspring like creeping phlox, late spring to early summer such as irises, mid- to late summer like echinacea, and fall such as asters. Select one or more from each group and you will have a show that lasts all season long.
- Mixed Textures: Look for perennials with thin, spiky flowers and some that have big, ruffly blooms, some with smooth leaves and others with fuzzy leaves. Lavender has thin foliage and narrow flower stalks. Poppies have big, fluttery blossoms and toothed leaves. The purple globes of alliums stand out among other flowers. Varying the styles and textures keeps the plants from all blending into one.
- Layered Effect: Give your perennial border different levels to draw your eyes into the scene. Start with tall choices such as hollyhocks or lilies. Columbine, salvia, and other medium-height perennials fill in beneath the tall ones. Include a few lower growers, such as heuchera and hosta to cover the bottoms of the other plants’ stems.
General Gardening Tips and Advice for Growing Perennials
How to Grow a Perennial Garden Border
- Shape Up: Border gardens don’t have to abut a building, path, driveway or lawn. They just need to be defined. They can be any shape you want, with sharp edges or curving lines.
- Arrange by Height: In general, the tallest plants should be at the back of the border (or the center, if it’s an island bed), mid-size plants in the middle and the lowest perennials in front. Don’t be too rigid about this or your border may look like stadium seating.
- Find Your Style: You can design a border garden to reflect your favorite color palette or you can select plants for their fragrance. You may want a border filled with colorful foliage plants. Or perhaps you love old-fashioned flowers. Whatever your preference, think about how you can express it through the plants you choose and how they are arranged.
- Groups Work: Individual plants spread out through your border garden can dilute their impact. Put together three or five plants of the same type and repeat the groupings a few times in the border. This establishes a visual rhythm that leads your eyes through the bed.
- Pollinator Support: Your border garden can work even harder for you by nurturing butterflies, bees, and other pollinators. Coneflowers, phlox, daisies, sedum, and eupatorium are all butterfly magnets.
- Hummers’ Home: If you live where hummingbirds are common, plant monarda and lobelia. These two perennials are favorite nectar sources, thanks to their long, tubular flowers in bright colors such as red, orange, and yellow.
Plant tags, garden catalogs and websites provide you with all the information you need to choose perennials that fit your requirements, but you can also check out some excellent books on perennials, such as Alan Armitage’s Garden Perennials or The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer, by Stephanie Cohen and Nancy J. Ondra. And as Cohen and Ondra advise, don’t worry too much about the “rules” of perennial borders. The idea, after all, is to have fun and to create a border that pleases you.