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Visualising plants in a new border

WoostieWoostie Posts: 53
in Problem solving
Hi, I'm in the process of planting up 2 brand new flower beds and am finding choosing the plants to be more difficult than I expected. Does anyone know of any website which has the facility of seeing what plants looks like next to each other please? Or a website which makes suggestions about which plants look good together? I've tried RHS and Crocus and although they give a lot of information about each plant they either don't make suggestions or at least not very good ones. Many thanks.
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  • K67K67 Posts: 2,506
    What size are the beds?
    Do you want just flowers or some shrubs, something evergreen.
    Alan Titchmarsh talks about the triangle effect tall, medium and low, plant perennials in groups of 3, 5, 7. Do you want some spring bulbs?

    What colours are you intending to have, what plants do you like, how much time have you normally to garden, what is your soil like, how much sun.

    Think about these things first even if you find a website to help you need to narrow down your choices.


  • LoxleyLoxley Posts: 5,698
    edited June 2020
    You could do collage/mood boards using photos, sketching the border out on paper (in elevation) can help. There's no way round it though, getting things wrong and planning next year's changes is one of the main joys of gardening!
    "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour". 
  • Butterfly66Butterfly66 Posts: 970
    If you’ve got a combination you’re thinking of try googling it. Best to only try two at a time say “rudbeckias and asters” and you may get images up of the two together. Might not always work but may help. Otherwise as @Willdb says collecting pictures of plants you’re thinking of and placing them together can help. Pinterest is a good way of collecting lots of images together, easy to use as well. Or maybe find an image of a border that you really like and then copy or adapt the plants used for your garden.
    I’ve done this before with a photo from magazines, maybe I loved the shapes and effects but not the colours. So I used it as inspiration and chose varieties in the colours I wanted or (if none) chose a plant that would give me the same/similar effect.

    There is an RHS book on Planting Combinations which gives lots of suggestions and why (e.g. the different period of interest, contrast or complement in colour etc) but it doesn’t have pictures of all the combinations suggested. 

    It’s such a subjective topic anyway, a combination I love you might hate and vice versa. I find the suggestions in Crocus quite useful even if I don’t like the specific suggestion it sometimes gives you a feel of what shape/colour of plant might work.

    I do think to get started you need to set yourselves some rules such as specific colours or period of interest and maybe a must-have plant. Then you could start with choosing the variety of must-have plant and go from there.

    Maybe not so easy with the current restrictions, but at the GC why not try combinations of plants by placing some you really like next to others. Then you get a real life look at them together 




     If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”—Marcus Tullius Cicero
    East facing, top of a hill clay-loam, cultivated for centuries (7 years by me). Birmingham
  • Mr. Vine EyeMr. Vine Eye Posts: 2,394
    edited June 2020
    I use my computer or iPad - using something like Word or anything that lets you paste photos on to a document to move around.

    Then you can paste in photos off the internet and shuffle them around. Helps me visualise it. I did this when I was trying to work out where to put some new roses.


    East Yorkshire
  • AmphibiosAmphibios Posts: 158
    The gardenia website is really good because it will suggest different combinations for a plant of your choice. However it is American based and not all the suggested plants will work in the U.K. 
  • Bright starBright star Posts: 1,153
    I love the gardenia website too, some great planting combinations and most plants available in uk, great plant info too.
    Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late.

  • AnniDAnniD Posts: 12,585
    I'm going "old school" and recommending a book. It's a few years old, but the basic principles remain the same, and even though l'd been gardening for a few years when it was published, l found it really useful and referred to it for years.
    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guide-Creative-Gardening-Readers-Digest/dp/0276352238/ref=sr_1_16?dchild=1&qid=1591437607&refinements=p_27:Readers+Digest&rnid=1025612&s=books&sr=1-16

    Trying to visualise what a border will look like is one of the hardest things to do in gardening, in my opinion. Sometimes things work and sometimes they don't.  The fun then is in shifting plants around,  my mum was forever doing that.
    As suggested above, visiting a garden centre and seeing plants "in the flesh" is usually the best way to do it,but it's true that under the current restrictions they might not be too keen on you picking pots up, putting them together and putting back ones you don't like.
    My only other advice would be to visit the garden centre (either virtually or in real life) several times a year so that you have plants giving year round interest. 
  • WoostieWoostie Posts: 53
    Thank you so much for all your replies. @K67, I'm quite sorted with what type of plants I want, soil PH, height and spread etc. I've even mapped out the beds on graph paper (I've obviously had too much time on my hands). The real problem is trying to imagine what they all look like together. 

    I have visited a couple of garden centres (and keep finding new plants I love to add to the problem) but I live in quite a rural area so my choices are limited. I will check out the gardenia website, and check out the book mentioned by @AnniD.

    @Mr. Vine Eye, I love the idea of using a Word document. I'm not especially techy but I will definitely give that a go.

    Thanks everyone :smiley:
  • LoxleyLoxley Posts: 5,698
    By the way when I mentioned sketching an elevation view, I don't mean a fully drawn sketch necessarily... you can draw circles and blobs representing rounded shrubs, horizontal lines representing flat heads of Sedum and Achillea, vertical lines representing Verbena bonariensis, and 'tuft' shapes representing things like daylilies and grasses... the forms of plants and how they balance each other out is at least as important as colour; Noel Kingsbury reckons the best way to design a good border is to consider whether it would work in a black and white photo.
    "What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour". 
  • ButtercupdaysButtercupdays Posts: 4,546
    edited June 2020
     You never get to that point!
    You can love everything you're looking at and still think "I wonder if a small tree would look good there?" or "It would be nice to have a pergola to grow more roses and clems" or "Those look really good. I must get some more to go over there"..... :)
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