How to choose the right plants for your garden

Getting the right plants in your garden for both where you live, and the style of your garden is important. The reason for this is quite simple, planting new plants is both expensive and time consuming.

You should look at your gardens exposure to sunlight, look how much shade you have, and how this changes through the year, you can even look back on previous years weather, looking on sites such as 
http://weatherspark.com/
 to get an idea of the type of weather you get. this will then inform you of your climate.

Next you need to look into your soil type, sandy, clay heavy, or full of organic matter?

These will all impact upon what you can grow, if you had your heart set on an alpine garden then unless you have a sandy well draining poor quality soil, you have more work to do before you plant. Finally the pH of your soil will also impact upon what will thrive there. Why go to all these lengths?

If you have limited time in which to look after your garden, you really want everything else going for you. Yes you can grow anything, anywhere. It just changes the amount of time you need to spend helping the plants survive in environments that they aren’t suited to, and depending on how far out side the plants zone you are growing it, you may have to invest in equipment as well. So instead of making your garden a challenge, work with nature.

Once you have all this information you need to get yourself some plants, to pick them you need to know about them and books like

 are a great investment, they give you a great resource with which to select plants that flower when you want, and grow in the conditions you have in your garden.

It is also worth having a look at what your neighbours are growing, and what looks to be growing well, or what has been left in your garden that thrives.

As you can see in this picture of my garden the clethra arborea (Lily of the Valley tree), dark green leaves with the light red and yellow green, is a happy health plant, what does this tell you?

Well if you were to do a quick search on the growing conditions of such a plant you would find it likes acidic soil that is well draining and not to heavy (clay heavy) that grows in anything from shade to full sun, which is handy as the spot its in gets everything from total shade to blazing sun as the day progresses.

So with out spending any money on expensive equipment you can identify key feature of your garden by what is already growing there, and a little bit or research.

Once you have the knowledge you can begin the process of looking at the plants which will thrive naturally in your garden to select the ones which fit with your theme.

More on plant selection next time.

What Grows well in your garden?

Happy gardening Doug