Garden plants
80 plants across six habits. A habit decides more about where a plant goes than its category does — what it needs built for it, how much room it will eventually take, and whether it is there in winter.
The garden in August
The whole of August →- Plantbearded iris, hardy cyclamen
- Harvestrowan, dahlia, hippeastrum
- Pruneberberis, escallonia, firethorn, lavender, mock orange, hawthorn, holly and 7 more
- Dividebearded iris
Next month: 2 more jobs open in September. See what changes
Why these six and not one long list
A shrub, a climber and a bulb raise completely different questions. A climber needs to know what it will hold on with before anything is planted, because a twiner on a flat trellis simply falls off. A tree needs an ultimate height, since that is the number the label leads with least and the one people live with longest. A bulb needs to say whether it survives the winter in the ground. None of those questions is meaningful for the other two, so they are asked on separate pages rather than averaged into one.
Start from the corner you are trying to fill
Or browse by habit
- Shrubs26 in the catalogue, 15 evergreenThe permanent structure of a border, chosen on foliage and ultimate size rather than on what is flowering the day you buy it.
- Garden trees9 in the catalogue, 2 evergreenThe one planting decision that is effectively permanent, and the one where the label's height is not the number that matters.
- Climbers12 in the catalogue, 7 evergreenWhat the plant holds on with decides what you have to build, and it is the question nursery labels answer least well.
- Ornamental grasses and sedges6 in the catalogue, 3 evergreenGrouped as a gardener shops for them, kept apart in the data, and divided by the one thing that decides how they are cut back.
- Ferns9 in the catalogue, 6 evergreenThe plants deep shade is for — and not all of them want the damp ground they are always described as needing.
- Bulbs, corms, rhizomes and tubers18 in the catalogueFour different organs sold under one word, and the difference decides how you divide them and whether they survive the winter.
When to plant, and why the answer is usually autumn
Trees, shrubs, climbers and bulbs all establish best when they go in during autumn, and the reason is the same for all of them.
Soil holds its heat for weeks after the air has lost it. That lag is the whole argument: a plant put in during autumn has stopped making leaves but has not stopped making roots, so it spends the next two months building the thing it will need next July. The same plant put in during spring comes into leaf before the cold soil below it can supply the water those leaves lose, which is why it has to be watered all summer and the autumn-planted one does not.
Two groups qualify it. Anything tender or borderline is better planted in spring, so that it has a full season in the ground before its first winter, and the same goes for perennials on heavy wet soil — an echinacea lost over winter has usually rotted rather than frozen. Bulbs run to their own timetable: most go in from September, but tulips wait until November. The bulbs hub has the depths, and August in the garden has what is open now.
Or start from your conditions rather than from a habit
If you know the position and not the plant, the question is the other way round.
What can I grow? takes your light, soil, space and month and answers from the same catalogue these hubs are built from — including what it rules out and why, which is the half of the answer most plant finders leave off. The collections are the pre-computed version for the questions that come up most.