Favourite perennials

I’ve recently been doing two Youtube videos, one on my channel, the Middlesized Garden, and the second with Rachel Darlington of the Gardening at Douentza Youtube channel.

We picked our 10 best perennials (five each), choosing them for being long flowering, easy to grow or absolute show stoppers.

I realised that I didn’t want to recommend five show stoppers.

You only really need one “wow” plant in a border at any one time, and the other plants are often there to support it. It’s rather like having a top singer supported by an orchestra.

So I recommended a humble but pretty ground cover perennial called Prunella vulgaris, otherwise known as Self Heal. I saw this in my sister-in-law’s garden and am planning to get it for my own.

It has sweet, pretty pink, blue or white flowers, is loved by pollinators and spreads easily to cover your ground and help prevent weeds.

Some people do say it spreads too easily, but it’s not difficult to pull out any extra plants.

My other choices were Agastache, which flowers for four months and comes in a wide range of excellent pinks, reds, orange or white.

Euphorbia has great shape and a wide range of varieties, a great supporting perennial. I’m new to loving persicaria, but have been won round for its pollinator-friendly clumps of spiked flowers.

Finally, I picked one show-stopper – the iris. If you have a few irises in flower in your garden, then it’ll look good even if nothing else is out.

When I started gardening, I assumed such a showy flower would be difficult to look after, but irises are amazingly resilient, dealing with the coldest winter, resisting drought and flowering brilliantly – even with a certain amount of neglect.