Beautiful, easy summer planting combinations to try out at home
Showstoppers and easy-to-create planting partnerships from the Chelsea Flower Show.
If you’re landing here for the first time, welcome - I’m delighted you’ve found us. There’s lots going on here - garden design ideas, easy gardening how-tos, plant recommendations, general garden chat, border planting design tips and tricks and lots more. If you’d like to join in, I’d love it:
Before we jump into easy plants and Chelsea secrets, if you’re new to The Gardening Mind, you might like to have a tootle around some of the things we chat about.
Small Garden Design Course
You can start this at any time - head to all previous sections here.
How to design a border?
If you’re wondering where on earth to start with a border planting design, you can find how-to and ideas in these articles, where I break the whole process down for you into bite size chunks. Here are some of them: how to design a border in your garden, how to design a flowerbed, and how on earth to start with border planting design.
Sunday’s Show Us Your Plots
Do look out for the Chat that takes place here every Sunday morning. It’s a chance for us all to share photos of our gardens or a green space near us. As I haven’t been home for a month, I’ve no idea what’s in store for me when I return later today. Yikes.
And phew! I’m back
Well just about, anyhow. It’s my last day at the show, and I’ve been desperate to share with you the plants and combinations that we’ve been talking about so long here in The Gardening Mind. This week, we’re taking a delve into some of plants in the Chelsea Flower Show Glasshouse Garden that caught people’s eye, along with some of the planting combinations, which I swear are easy to recreate at home. I’ve honestly been overwhelmed by the sheer amount of positivity that exploded at this colour palette, which I’ve been talking about here since the garden was first announced.
I promised you I wanted to show something new in terms of colour for Chelsea, and here it is:
Today we’re going to take a look at each of these, along with combinations so that you can easily recreate areas of this in your own garden , whether it’s in a pot, a border, or a good old island bed.
If you’re already a member of The Gardening Mind, you’ll already know that I’m never going to do anything too difficult - borders can be beautiful without being hard to grow and look after.
There’s so much to write about this garden, and this article is only the beginning. Next time, I’ll be talking about that all important atmosphere, the mood created by the plants and how I started thinking about the plants that created that special moment.
Before we get to that, though, let’s dive into the plants and the planting combinations themselves:
Here’s the first combination:
One of the stars of the show was a form of Beth’s Poppy that no-one had seen before. Beth’s Poppy itself (its Latin name is Papaver dubium subsp. lecoqii 'Albiflorum' which no-one ever is going to remember, which is why we just use its common name Beth’s Poppy) was scattered through the garden, sugar pink dots creating sparkly highlights against deeper colours. But these poppies shown in this photo were surprisingly different, a real surprise to everyone, and I’m going to be keeping these plants in order to harvest the seed. They are very special indeed - now to think of a name for this newcomer:
In the photos above and below, she’s planted with a super-easy combination of