Plan Your Summer Garden

Richard Wilford, Head of Garden Design at Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, gives this great advice

- Richard Wilford

STRUCTURE

Structures in a border provide the frame for your planting. They are the anchor around which herbaceous plants can spread. Structures can be a wall, hedge, sculpture, obelisks for climbing plants, or evergreen shrubs, or topiary, like the yew pyramids along the Great Broad Walk at Kew Gardens. The structure will be there all year round.

TIME

Summer in the garden is a long season. It begins in May, with alliums and early sages like purple-blue Salvia ‘Serenade’, and finishes in late September with yellow rudbeckias, purple asters and russet sneezeweeds, like Helenium ‘Moerheim Beauty’. Choose plants that will give a succession of blooms over the whole season. Also, take note of where the sun rises and sets during summer and plant to make the most of the low rays of light at the beginning or end of the day.

COLOUR