10 essential tips for choosing plants for your garden
How professional gardeners and designers choose plants for gardens
If you're thinking about new plants for your garden, as I am, my best advice to everyone is to follow the below steps to selecting plants as the professionals do.
Follow these tips for the best chance of success, reducing disappointment and costly mistakes.
There are thousands upon thousands of plants available today in the UK and thanks to the internet, we can research them better to find out if they are suitable for our gardens. It's always tempting to go with what we know or what looks best in the nursery, but I never plant gardens in this way. I will always use data and a bit of desk research when selecting plants.
1) Annual, biennial or perennial?

Annuals live for one year, biennials grow leaves in the first year, flower and die in the second. Perennial plants will keep coming back year-after-year.
Many people say to me they picked up some lovely plants in the garden centre only to find they eventually die. When I ask what the plant was, there are usually two reasons. First, the plant was an annual like cosmos or a biennial like a foxglove, destined to eventually die. Second, the plant is a perennial and hasn't actually died, it's just gone dormant in winter.
My advice, especially to beginner gardeners, is to focus on perennials because most will grow for years, growing larger and can then be divided for free plants. By all means do grow annuals and biennials, they are brilliant if they self sow like foxgloves, but make a note to remember these will die eventually.
2) Final height and width

This is incredibly important. If you take one thing from this list, make it this point. When you look at plants online and on plant labels in shops, you should find the final height and width of a plant. Always plant it imagining that final size, not to how it is when you get it. Give them that much space.
I know it's tempting to squeeze a beautiful little shrub from a garden centre into a 50cm gap in your garden, but if it will eventually become a 4 x 4m witch hazel, it will soon outgrow the spot or pot!
As a designer, I never plant anything in a position with a view to cutting it to keep it to size - this creates far more work, which is easy to forget doing, and usually ends up with ugly chopped up plants. Stick to this rule - give plants space to grow to their final size - and your plants will grow happily side-by-side, without crowding each other out. And it will make less work for you.
3) Hardiness

Hardiness means what temperature a plant can survive down to, how cold a plant can get before it dies. Though in hot countries, where temperatures exceed 40C regularly, gardeners might be thinking the other way around! Wet can also have an impact on hardiness, but it’s mainly about temperature.
To check your hardiness rating in the UK:
First check the Met Office’s Location Specific Longterm Average tool.
Then check the RHS Hardiness ratings page to find the rating that best fits your lowest temperature.
This will give you a guide to plants that are hardy in your area. Don’t choose plants that are too tender and won’t survive.
In the UK our hardiness ratings go from H1 which is for tender plants that can't survive our winters, to H7 for super hardy able to survive any cold (H = hardiness).
When we lived in London I would grow plants with an H3 rating (able to survive to -5C) or higher, up to H7 (able to survive temperatures lower than -20C!) Nowadays, in our garden in Yorkshire, the middle of the UK, we’ve experienced temperatures down to -8C. This puts our garden in the H4 hardiness category.
I only plant stuff that is in the H4 - H9 hardiness rating that can’t survive at least those temperatures. However, we live 1,000ft above sea level on an exposed hill, which puts extra strain on plants, so in some winters, we certainly experience worse weather than most.
If you live outside the UK, your country will have similar tools. In the US and Canada, it is the USDA hardiness rating split into zones. USDA actually applies to the world over, our garden is in hardiness zone 8b-9a. There are more zones than in the UK and I actually think this is a better way of talking about hardiness.
While it's tempting to try a plant that’s tender, hoping for the best, to avoid disappointment, put that to one side and research the other thousands of plants available with the correct hardiness.
4) Sun vs shade
This is a topic that the gardening world has spent decades making more complicated than it needs to be. Simply put, if the area you want to plant receives direct sun all day, it's full sun. If it doesn't have any direct sun or only has some for a short time, it's shade. Part-shade tends to mean that the area is still fairly sunny, but not all day.
Tempting as it is, only add plants into the correct light conditions. If the description says the plant is for shade, only plant it in shade. If it says it needs full sun, only plant it in full sun.
One of the biggest mistakes I find people make is to plant sun loving plants in part-shade or full shade, hoping they will somehow survive. Particularly these days as the gardening world is keen on promoting sun loving plants from the Mediterranean and California. Rest assured, there are just as many beautiful and colourful plants for shady spots as there are for sun, thousands of them!
5) Soil pH

Most plants available through nurseries are generalists, tolerant of most soils, but there are some you might need to avoid if your soil is not neutral in pH.
If you remember chemistry at school, pH is the difference between acidity and alkalinity. Depending on what they are made of, our soils can be acidic, alkaline or neutral.
If you live on limestone or chalk, your soil is probably alkaline, while if you live near moors or on clay, like us, your soil may be acidic. Many soils are neutral and you can pick up home test kits cheaply online.
If your soil is strongly acidic or alkaline, avoid plants that don't like those conditions. As much as we may want them to, they are unlikely to grow well. For instance, in London the soil is neutral to alkaline in most areas, made more alkaline by watering with mains water. This meant plants that like acidic soils, such as rhododendron, witch hazel, cornus and other jazzy shrubs I enjoy, would often struggle unless the garden was definitely neutral.
6) Soil type

Soil is made up of lots of things including decomposed plant matter, but at its heart it will be made of sand, silt or clay.
Sandy soils are free draining and generally poor in nutrients because they have big particles and nutrients wash out quicker, but it is free draining and airy for roots to grow.
Clay soil is water retentive and locks in nutrients, but it can also be heavy and retain too much water.
Silt is somewhere between the two. The ideal is loam, which is a mix of everything.
The answer to improving all soil is a large amount of organic matter, essentially compost or naturally decomposed plant matter.
These days I aim for plantings that naturally produce their own organic matter, which is a big topic I discuss a lot in my newsletters and book, A Greener Life.
The important thing when choosing plants is to grow more of the plants that like your soil's natural conditions and avoid those that don't. For instance, plants like Monarda, Eupatorium and Astilbe that like water retentive soil are going to struggle on sandy soils. While drought tolerant plants like Rosemary, Eryngium and shrubby Salvias will love the free draining nature of sand.
7) Don't judge a plant by its flowers

Commercial garden centres and supermarkets have steered us into thinking plants in flower are somehow better than those that aren't. I hardly ever buy plants in flower because I plant in spring, months before most plants are due to flower, or autumn when they've finished! The important thing is to buy plants that are grown well, usually by specialist nurseries. Healthy leaves and roots are a much better method of judging the quality of a plant.
8) Buy small
Most of the perennials I buy are in small 9cm pots - in the plant world bigger is not better. For shrubs and trees I am more inclined to buy larger, though even then, younger plants I've observed can be quicker to establish themselves in the ground than larger plants that spent more of their early years in pots. Perennials in 9cm pots will be bigger than a plant bought in a 2-3 litre pot within one growing season. As for annuals, I would actually never buy an annual plant in a pot unless I really had to because they're so easy and cheap to grow from seed.
9) Avoid plants that need extra care

Unless you are a really keen gardener with lots of spare time, if a plant description says it needs staking, extra fertilising or regular pruning, my advice is: don't bother. Put it down and choose something that doesn't need any of these things.
For instance, I love dahlias but the vast majority need lots of strong supporting structures and tying in with twine. There are however a large number of smaller dahlias that grow without the need for support. And many hundreds of other big blowsy flowering plants that support themselves. In our garden I don't grow anything that needs support, fertilising or excessive pruning (I list plants in my paid tier newsletters).
Of course, every now and then it’s worth staking a plant you really love and want to grow!
Another factor is vigour, some plants can be too vigorous in gardens and takeover, such bamboos that spread by rhizome rather than forming tight clumps, mint and Alchemilla mollis (lady’s mantel) are good examples. Not great for your garden, but worse if they spread past the boundary into the wild, resulting in problems like Japanese knotweed and Himalayan balsam taking over wild habitats. I’ll discuss this point more in a future article on vigour and competition.
10) Plan ahead
My big wish for everyone in 2025 is to have a beautiful garden with a little planning ahead. It’s fun I promise!
We've all gone to a garden centre on a weekend, splurging our hard earned cash, only to find not all the plants work out how we want. This can be avoided completely by planning your garden at home first.
Which is why I’ve been writing the Wild Way Garden Design Guide for you at full speed!
Spend a little time listing some plants, noting down their final size, shapes and colours. Consider how they will work together and where in your garden they will go. Then buy what's on your list. Most plants I now order online or from my trusted list of nurseries to get exactly what I want because I know they will do well in our garden thanks to the above points on this page.
Don't fall into the trap of going to one shop only to find they don't have half of what you want, and giving in, buying only what's on their shelves. This is the number one way of setting yourself up for failure.
Throughout 2025 I’ll be sharing lots of plants to try in your garden, from wildlife friendly flowers to high yield food crops. If you’d like even more ideas, the Wild Way paid subscription has over twice as much content across the year and access to hundreds articles in the archive.
While you dream of flowers, I hope this is a good overview to get started. Don't over think it, start with size and soil conditions and you're half way there.
Happy growing.
p.s. for ideas of what to do (and not to do!) in your garden in February, visit my guide here. And if you are a paid subscriber, don’t forget this list of plants:
A great guide! In my experience pH is the one that confuses non-garden people. Although the people who owned our house us before have a lot to answer for: planting a willow in the middle of the space that was 50ft tall when it came down in a storm. - I hate removing trees but the wood was put to good use and now better size trees are thriving.
This is great Jack, thank you