Problem-proof plants

Are you fed up with slugs feasting on your hostas and aphids attacking your roses? Hazel Silver has tips and advice on how to grow plants that resist pests and diseases

- Hazel Silver

THE four-letter-word moments of gardening tend to come from time and money spent on plants that are ruined by pests or diseases. Waking up to find seedlings gobbled by slugs or discovering the young leaves of perennials eaten by rabbits is miserable, as is seeing a climber caked in aphids or a hedge dusted with white powdery mildew.

Thankfully, there are plenty of stress-free plants that are rarely plagued by pests and diseases. If slugs are your nemesis, grow woolly-leaved stachys and pulmonaria, tough-leaved eryngium and crocosmia, and poisonous aconitum and foxgloves. Slugs also slide past ferns, grasses and roses, and seem to dislike several aromatics (including lavender). But every garden is different, and for the standard advice given – such as rudbeckia being slug-proof – there will be gardeners who widen their eyes and shake their heads, being unable to grow rudbeckia in wet summers when some of the slugs reach 4in (10cm).

Those who successfully grow the plants they love have their own trusted arsenal. Some go to the trouble of concocting a garlic brew that they spray on their hostas or placing beer traps among their dahlias every evening. Others provide nest boxes for slughungry hedgehogs. Nursery owner Claire Austin lets her silkie hens roam the garden to hunt slugs.

Create a healthy soil

Whatever your enemies – from rabbits to footballs – there are plants to foil them. Aphids dislike the aromatic leaves of nepeta and marigolds, so these can be dotted through borders, and both attract hoverflies whose larvae eat aphids. Ceasing to use chemicals will increase the amount of other aphid predators, such as ladybirds, as well as creating a healthy soil that will help to stave off disease.