6 perennial flowers that bloom all summer - plus a bonus plant - YouTube

If you want to have beautiful borders, then it's  really important to include some perennials that  

flower for a really long time - and these  are the ones that flower for months on end  

and very often you can clip them back and then  they will have a second flowering. It's Alexandra  

here from the Middle-sized Garden YouTube channel  and blog and i'm here at Doddington Place gardens  

in Kent, in the Sunk garden, which has four  herbaceous borders, each one around a pond.  

In my video on how to create beautiful borders,  I interviewed Tom Brown of West Dean gardens  

and one of the best tips he gave was that if  you want to have flower color in your garden  

all summer long, you should choose firework plants - and those are plants that are just so showy, they  

blaze brightly and people really remember them and  so they really carry the colour in your garden and  

that's things like tulips and irises and alliums - and iIll put that video in the description below,  

but the other element of creating a  really long lasting long flowering border  

is to choose these easy grow plants  that flower and flower and flower.  

So I'm asking Amicia Oldfield who. with her husband  Richard, owns Doddington Place gardens  

and the head gardener Lucy Adams to pick out six  plants which just go on and on flowering. I'll put  

links to Doddington Place gardens and any other  resources we mention in the description below  

and also time stamps to particular flowers, so if  you want to go back and have a bit of a look at  

one particular flower, then you can just click  on the time stamp. If you're new here, the Middle  

sized Garden uploads once a week with free videos  with tips, ideas and inspiration for your garden, so  

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These plants are really quite easy grow plants -  Doddington Place gardens is in southeast England, so  

that equates roughly to a hardiness zone,  a USDA hardiness zone of eight or nine,  

but actually many of these six plants will grow  in a much lower zone - it'll be from four to nine,  

so that means they will deal with really quite  cold winters - down to minus 20 Celsius.  

The other thing to remember when you're  choosing a plant as well as hardiness is  

how pollinator friendly it is - all these plants  are very pollinator friendly and also one of the  

problems with easy grow plants can be that  when they're easy grow in one place,  

they're actually quite invasive in another. Now  none of the six plants here that we're mentioning  

are invasive in either the UK, the USA or Australia  but i think it's important to stay aware of what's  

invasive near you. It's also worth noting that each  plant has got varieties, so, for example, there is a  

variety of euphorbia which is invasive in the  United States but most of the other varieties  

aren't, so just check the varieties because looking  at varieties and getting the right variety is  

often the key to getting good long flowering, disease free and other things like that.  

And the next thing to think about is which way  your border faces - if you've got a south facing  

border, then plants that like south facing border  will do very well there. Now one of the interesting  

things about being here in the Sunk garden is that  actually there are four borders around a pond and  

so of course each border has a slightly different  aspect, so these favorite plants had to be chosen  

as plants that would do well in several aspects  not plants that really needed say a south-facing  

border, so that's another interesting thing about  these really easy care plants . Now i'm going  

to ask Amicia for her choice of three plants. Well, the plants that that comes to mind  

first of all is a penstemon - I know some  people call them penstemons - you  

can get them in a wide range of colors and they  are have just begun flowering in the last week or so  

and i think they go until November or December - I've  even picked some, I think, in December, which is  

pretty staggering, isn't it - and you do have to cut  them back but they're quite tall. You could create  

a great mass of them and they look very very  good in the border, and you can get really lovely  

pinky ones like Sour Grapes or Stapleford Gem. We've got a pink one here- I can't remember  

what that's called. There's Alice Hindley, there are  all sorts of them and they're actually one of the  

plants that I liked the most when i first came here - before I really knew anything about gardening, and  

they're what's called 'good doers'. We did this  sunken garden - we forget when you do  

things, but we worked out we did it 11 years  ago - so they're still going and they show no  

sign of giving up and we've got one in the Rock  garden which we did at roughly the same time  

and that's still looking really great. The next  plant is euphorbias. I'd like to talk about them  

generally - euphorbias are very good value because  they're very interesting shapes and they're leafy  

they're not an obvious flowery plant. A lot of  people when they start off gardening just think of endless  

flowers, but actually I think the more you garden,  the more you realize that the contrasting leaf  

shapes are very interesting. And euphorbias flower  for ages - the one that we have is Characias which is a  

big one. It's only going over now and it's been in  flowers since, oh I don't know April or something - 

that's months and months, isn't it? You have to  be a bit careful because the seeds obviously fly  

everywhere and i'm always pulling out seedlings  more than I've ever done actually before in the  

last few years, but there are a wide range of  euphorbias and I think they're really excellent  

plants to have in the garden. Geraniums is the name  of a plant that everybody knows, isn't it?   

But there are all sorts of rather special ones  and we have one here called it's called Armenian  

Cranesbill - it's quite a shocking pink - magenta  perhaps is a better term for it - I don't know - 

but it's quite a large voluptuous plant and it  gets quite high and it's also quite floaty at the  

same time, so it's a very good plant in a border  and what I recommend is repeating all these things.  

If you look at successful borders, in my opinion,  they do quite a lot of repetition we actually here  

don't have repetition as such, in each border but  we've got four squares and we repeat the plants  

in the different squares, so that makes it cohesive  and brings it all together and then we put little  

pops of color - little different things in at  the same time- the geranium stay in the ground  

the whole year. We cut them back by the end of  the summer in August when it gets so hot and dry and

the leaves start to go a bit brown, so we cut them  back then, but they do spring back and they are in  

flower - I don't know how long - they've been in  flower for now three weeks or so and they're  

going to go on and on and on until the autumn, and  they look very good with dahlias, and we have  

quite a lot of brightly colored day lilies and they  look good with those. And now i'm going to ask Lucy  

Adams, head gardener, for her choice of three plants.  A really good easy plant - Knautia macedonica  

or the Macedonian scacious - beautiful color - deep crimson like a pincushion flower on it. 

It flowers from May to September and if  you can keep on top of the dead heading,  

that will keep it flowering really well. Bees love it, it looks good in most mixed  

herbaceous beds. It does tend to have a bit of a  sprawling habit so probably not one for the front  

of beds, although if you are wanting it towards  the front of your bed then I would recommend  

either giving it a 'chelsea chop' before it starts  putting on its long shoots for flowering and that  

will just give it a bit more strength, or if you've  got birch stick supports, just let it weave its way  

through some of those. So a 'Chelsea chop' -  it's called that because you do it in May -

as the plant is putting on its lush growth.  In order to reduce the flopping that you get with  

certain plants like phloxes - if you  take off about a third of their height, then it will give  

that strength to the stem and it will avoid it  doing the the complete flop when it's flowering -  

so if you don't want to be or you haven't got  the materials to go around staking everything,  

it's quite a quick and easy thing to do. And  number two is an Astrantia. I just love Astrantia  

- they're just such beautiful flowers,  I think they're also known as the Masterwort -  

there's huge variety of them, we've got various  different pink ones like Claret, Shaggy, Roma  

and they hold their flower really well,  they're flowering from very late spring through  

early summer and then once they've flowered,  you can deadhead them and you'll get a second  

flowering and they produce nice big clumps, they will grow in size pretty quickly,they  

like a fairly fertile, rich but well draining  soil, full sunshine, partial shade - you  

know, they will do well in most soils as  long as it's  

nutrient-rich. We always put our garden compost on  in the spring because it also then helps as a weed  

suppressant as well and they always do well with  that. The third may seem very unoriginal but roses, 

roses - there's a reason why they're so popular and  why they're everyone's favorite. If you can get  

one of the modern repeat flowering  shrub roses, they go well with a herbaceous scheme,  

they go well on their own, they go well as a  backdrop, they smell amazing, they flower and  

flower and flower, and as long as you can keep  on top of the dead heading, then you have a good  

summer long display. I think in terms of choosing your type  of rose, you want to go for more of a bush rose - 

one of the modern shrub roses - which are fairly  easy plants to grow - actually, they're not too  

pernickety, we always give ours a good feed - they  get a seaweed feed about four times a year,  

so once in the spring and probably another just  before flowering and then they'll get another in  

the end of autumn once they finish flowering,  just to harden them off before winter.  

I tend to prune mine in my herbaceous beds  a little bit higher than you would necessarily  

if you're growing the roses on their own. In  the winter I leave them a little bit taller  

then the flowers will stand out over some of the  much higher growing perennials that we've got  

in the garden - that's Felicia and it's  just an amazing scent - it just flowers  

from now through to August, then  you have a little bit of a down time,  

when it's - you know - looking a little bit quiet and  then again it'll come back so it's a great rose.  

As I was leaving , I couldn't resist a bonus plant  because these Anthemis just look so gorgeous  

and they're just lovely mounds of light, cheerful  colour in the border. So iIve actually added this  

one as my own choice. Anthemis is also known as  golden Marguerite or Dyer's chamomile and they  

establish very quickly into lovely clumps and once  they're established, they're very drought tolerant,  

if you keep dead heading, they'll go on  flowering for about three months and Lucy  

also has a clever trick - what I generally do  is the Chelsea chop on the front half  

and then that supports the back half, and then  when that's finished having its first flush of  

flowers, this one's flowering, then you can deadhead  that back to the new buds, and then you get that  

sort of continuous flowering - that just extends it  that bit longer - I've pulled together all our  

creating Beautiful Borders advice in the beautiful  borders playlist at the end of this video, 

and if you'd like more tips, ideas and  inspiration then do subscribe to the  

Middlesized Garden Youtube channel  and thank you for watching, goodbye!