Planning a Year of Colour in the Garden

By Testing Soil pH Without Fancy Equipment
Comments 35
23 Jun 2026

Planning a Year of Colour in the Garden

Start with a calendar, not a plant list

Most of us buy plants the way we buy shoes — because they caught our eye on the day. That works beautifully in May and leaves you staring at bare soil in September. Succession planting is simply the discipline of asking, before anything goes in the ground, "what will be flowering here in three months' time?"

Before you spend a penny, draw up a rough grid with the months of the year down one side and your border's main planting spaces along the top. Fill it in with what you already grow, not what you dream of growing. The blank squares become your shopping list, and they are usually in late winter, early spring and late summer. Those are the gaps worth spending money on.

Overlap is the whole trick. A plant should be opening as its neighbour fades, not waiting politely for a clear run. If a clump of hardy geranium finishes in July and the asters don't start until September, you have six weeks of nothing — exactly the sort of hole that tempts people to fill borders with too many shrubs.

Spring: let the bulbs do the heavy lifting

Bulbs are the cheapest colour you will ever buy, and they ask for nothing but a sunny autumn afternoon and decent drainage. Layer them in the same patch at different depths — a technique sometimes called lasagne planting — so that a single square metre delivers three months of flower.

January–February: snowdrops, winter aconites, early crocus, Iris reticulata.
March: Narcissus 'February Gold' and 'Tête-à-Tête', grape hyacinths, more crocus.
April–May: tulips and camassia, with alliums close behind.

Plant all of them in September and October, while the soil is still warm. Underneath, have perennials already pushing through: pulmonaria, hellebores, epimedium and the first fern croziers. A shrub or two earns its place here as well — Viburnum × bodnantense 'Dawn' scents the whole garden from November to March, and skimmia carries its buds through the worst of the weather.

The late-spring handover

This is where a border is won or lost. Tulips are going over just as the perennials are finding their feet, and if the gap is too wide you get the sad sight of bare earth flecked with fallen petals. Fill it with alliums, which relish the same conditions and leave handsome seedheads behind, and with early hardy geraniums such as 'Johnson's Blue'.

Bearded iris, aquilegia, peonies and the first salvias take the border into June. Look at foliage as carefully as flowers here — heuchera, bronze fennel, the soft grey of Stachys byzantina. Leaf colour lasts far longer than flower colour, and it is what carries a border through the weeks when little else is out.

High summer and the second wind

By July you want volume: achillea, nepeta, veronicastrum, phlox, helenium, crocosmia and the first echinacea. Deadhead religiously — a weekly walk with a bucket is worth more than any feed — and many perennials will reward you with a smaller second flush in September.

Then comes the best-kept secret of the late border: asters, Japanese anemones, rudbeckia, helianthus and the sedums, whose flat heads hold bees long after everything else has finished. Leave the seedheads standing rather than cutting back in autumn; they feed goldfinches and look superb rimed with frost.

Winter structure, and a word for the heathers

Winter colour comes from stems, bark, scent and form rather than petals. Dogwoods with red and orange stems, the peeling white bark of a birch, the dark silhouette of an evergreen, grasses left uncut so they rattle and catch the low light — molinia, calamagrostis, the finer stipas. Add sarcococca and mahonia for scent, hamamelis for a January surprise, and a pot of winter jasmine by the door.

Heathers deserve a better reputation than they have. Calluna vulgaris flowers from July into November and Erica carnea covers January to April — between them they fill the two hardest ends of the year, and bees use them heavily. They need sun and sharp drainage; on alkaline soil, grow them in ericaceous compost in a raised bed or a container.

They are also a reminder of what we have lost. Lowland heathland is one of Britain's rarest habitats — rarer, by some measures, than rainforest — and it supports nightjars, Dartford warblers, silver-studded blue butterflies and a great many solitary bees. Gardens cannot replace it, but they can help. Choose peat-free compost, because extracting peat destroys the very bogs and heaths these plants belong to. Never lift plants from the wild. And if you have room for a patch of acid-loving natives — heather, bilberry, gorse — you will find it humming with life by August. A well-planned border is a generous thing: colour for you, and cover and nectar for everything else.

Garden Design

Creating Habitat Piles from Prunings and Leaves

Pots dry out quickly in wind and sun. Water deeply until it runs from the base, then wait until the top few centimetres feel dry.

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5 Comments

Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply
- John Abraham says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
  
  I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
  Reply
  - Robert Sonnysays Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am
    
    I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
    Reply
Robert Sonny says Jul 21, 2024 at 10:00am

I must explain to you how all this mistaken idea of denouncing pleasure and praising pain was born and I will give you a complete account of the system
Reply

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