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?

Cosmos ‘Purity’ is incredibly beautiful and flowers for months but it is an annual and will die in autumn, unlikely to self sow in the UK, leaving gaps in your garden next year.

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 peop…