Alan Titchmarsh: Beautifying your borders
The gardener, writer and bradcaster Alan Titchmarsh shares his tips on making the most of your flower borders.
Flower borders should be as deep as possible for maximum floral impact. That’s the received wisdom and, generally speaking, I would agree, not least because plants do have a habit of growing sideways, as well as upwards, and the stronger brutes will swamp their less-robust bedfellows unless all are given plenty of elbow room.
Yet, over the years, I have had great delight from what I have come to call ‘ribbon borders’: long, narrow ‘rivers’ of plants between 2ft and 3ft wide, often running alongside a path. They have a delicacy that larger beds and borders can never possess, but they also have charm and elegance when planted up thoughtfully.
In larger borders, we are exhorted to plant in generous drifts — fives, sevens, 11s and so on. (The odd numbers are quoted by nothing more than habit — there is nothing wrong in planting in fours, sixes, 10s and 12s, as the eye is not nearly so irritated by even numbers in the garden as is popularly supposed.)
In my ribbon borders, I find the most pleasing effect is to plant single specimens of a smaller number of species or varieties and mix them all up. The effect may sound too ‘cottagey’ for formal gardens, yet the effect — due to repetition — is anything but spotty. Too many plants of a single variety will make the border look like a trial ground rather than a feature in itself and the delicacy of the creation is lost.
Such borders can be straight — running either side of a walk that leads to a greenhouse or garden building — or they can snake their way across the garden alongside a winding path of gravel, paving or cobbles.
Siting them alongside a pathway is, perhaps, the secret, for then they do not look mean, but appear as embellishments. Keeping to a smaller number of varieties, so that the pattern is, in effect, repeated, gives the whole creation a kind of cohesiveness that would be lost if too many varieties were present.
A favourite at the moment is a narrow border that runs alongside the terrace of our new house where I have used only three different plants, the combination of which I enjoyed in the garden we’ve left behind: Geranium Patricia (no more than 2ft high with magenta flowers), Nepeta racemosa ‘Walker’s Low’ (a catmint of lavender blue just slightly taller) and along the edges, it being lower growing, Alchemilla mollis, lady’s mantle, with its froth of lime-green flowers. Having found this combination that worked for me a couple of years ago, I was reluctant to forgo the pleasure it gave.
The joy of this sort of planting is that if one tires of it there is no need to rip the whole thing out. Change only one plant in the combination and the effect is totally altered: a new colour can be introduced or a plant of a different stature added into the mix for greater height, bold foliage or a different flowering season. That said, the greatest impact is achieved if all the plants flower at the same time.
The narrow border alongside part of the house that runs at right angles to the main block is planted up with two varieties: the pale-pink, cluster-flowered shrub rose Bonica, mixed with ‘Hidcote’ lavender.
There is nothing novel about the tried-and-tested combination of roses and lavender, but the mixture of pale pink and deep lavender blue is hugely pleasing to the eye and Bonica — a variety bred by Meilland in France in 1985 that has the RHS Award of Garden Merit — is a rose recommended as being a good ‘doer’ on my sandy soil.
Most roses relish heavier ground and are prone to mildew and blackspot on impoverished earth. I have beefed up my free-draining acid sand with masses of well-rotted manure and will continue to mulch it each year with more of the same. Bonica repeat flowers, but also produces attractive hips if not dead-headed. If it has one drawback, that is its ‘delicate’ scent (a euphemism for ‘hardly there’), but I forgive it such a shortcoming for the other attributes, including large clusters of flower and healthy foliage, that it brings to this particular party.
The great advantage with these narrow borders is ease of cultivation — they can be worked from both sides — and the ability to change them quite dramatically by adjusting their make-up. Slender they may be, but the amount of joy they bring this particular gardener is out of all proportion to their stature.
Chatsworth: The gardens and the people who made them by Alan Titchmarsh is out now (Ebury, £35).
This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
