Will someone please help me fill a flower bed?

[hawleybits]

I'm a novice really. I have a flower bed to fill from scratch. I'd like it to:

• Look pretty all year round with perinnals and some bedding for summer. *Have things that wont grown more than a metre tall as under a window.
• Masses of colour

The bed is in partial shade S/W facing, gets lots of afternoon sunshine in summer and apparently has free draining sandy soil. Size is approx 1mtr x 3mtrs

I'd really appreciate some help to make it pretty.

Here are a few plants that do well in similar conditions for me:

Erysimum 'Bowles' Mauve' - Can flower for ages, attracts lots of butterflies too.
Nicotianas (summer bedding) - come in many different colours, you need to plant a little clump rather than just the one plant.
Heucheras - very colourful foliage, lots of different varieties
Rosemary - Flowers very early in the year, provides a nice evergreen background at other times.
Lavender - nice greyish leaves when not flowering too.
Salvias - flower for ages and very brightly coloured, do need to be cut back every year to stop the plant from becoming too leggy.
Euphorbias - nice shape and although mostly green in colour, some have bright lime green bracts and some have red.
Ornamental grasses - the evergreen ones look good all winter, some have colourful flowers in the autumn
Penstemons - Do grow a bit leggy with time, but easily replaced from cuttings if necessary
Arctic poppies - very bright, you can treat as summer bedding

Mixed Cornflowers - scatter seed & do nothing else, they are lovely.
Bishop of Llandaff dahlia - wine leaves & red flowers, mine still has buds on it and has been in flower for 2.5 months.
Geraniums (Johnson's blue)
Delphiniums
Underplant with some spring bulbs (tulips, daffs, bluebell hyacinths) for earlier colour.
Oh, nasturtiums too, deep orange flowers & attractive fleshy leaves (I bought 1, yes 1 pack of Lidl seeds over 10 yrs ago and they self seed all over the place still.
Dicentra - bleeding heart bush - flowers like earrings.

Forget me nots, forgot them!

Thank you ladies. I will spend some time looking at your suggestions and working out planting order. Is there any sort of website tool for doing this?

Yes I would love to know what to be doing when.
Am utter novice really and very good at killing plants.

I tend to plant the framework plants first - the perennials and shrubs that will form the background of the planting. I do this in the autumn so they have time to set their roots into the ground while the soil is still warm from the summer, that way they really get going as soon as spring starts.

In between I put some perennials that die down in the winter. Again, I usually plant them in autumn unless they are of borderline hardiness in which case I put them in in spring.

In between these, to fill gaps where the perennials will still be small in spring I put spring flowering bulbs of all kinds.

Then I fill in further gaps with annuals and bedding plants. In the early years, while the background is getting established, annuals and bedding dominate the planting, then when these get more established I just leave in the ones which self seed or use them to fill temporary gaps where other plants have gone dormant.

In general, the key to not killing plants is giving them enough water when it's hot and not too much when it isn't. So good drainage for the winter, and water retentive soil for the summer.