What to plant with dogwoods?

[Allthenumbers]

I’m a complete garden beginner trying to sort out my garden. Please help!

I’m working on one patch. Now the weeds are gone it is so bare! It’s west facing but quite shaded by buildings. There’s a lovely acer and an established dogwood that I will prune back soon. I’ve just planted two more dogwoods (another red stemmed and a green/yellow one) but they’re both quite small right now. So there is just lots of empty space at the moment. What else can I plant?!

I found a viburnum davidii after some googling but a bit put off as you need a male and female plant up get the attractive berries I think and nurseries don’t specify what you’re getting.

I really have no knowledge of plants other than what I’m frantically googling!

Thank you!

Annuals are your friend! Perennials like your dogwood either stay as they are or grow back year after year. They're often slow to grow because of this. While you're waiting, look out for annuals that will fill the space for a few months at a time - that way when your perennials grow they won't be horribly crowded. They'll have space to grow into.

Many are very easy to grow from seed so they're cheap to stuff your garden full of. Marigolds, scented stocks, cornflowers, love-in-a-mist.

Some perennials are easy to propagate so the other thing you can do is buy one or two 'parent' plants and take lots of cuttings to spread around your garden - salvia, geraniums, fuchsias. Your dogwood will grow well from cuttings as well. If you have to move something later to make space it's less painful if you have a lot of it!

Thanks, that’s really helpful!

Can I just ask a really basic question- if I bought annuals, does that mean they’d last this year only and then I’d buy again next year if I wanted more?

Whereas perennials die back but are sort of hidden under the soil and magically reappear in the spring?! (I know the dogwood is always there but the geraniums would die back and regrow?)

Thanks!

Pretty much - some perennials stay there but drop their leaves or look dead, but if you trim them and tidy them up a bit you see nice new shoots coming up next Spring. We have a lot of knapweed (mountain cornflower) in our garden and that disappears altogether for about 3 months, then pops up again in Feb/March.

With annuals they would only last the year you planted them (although occasionally a particularly tough one in a sheltered spot lasts through winter), but what they might do is seed themselves. Marigolds for example flower, then form seed heads, drop their seed and pop up all over the place next Spring!

I bought a dogwood a couple years ago and it’s grown pretty quickly, has to be the easiest plant I have ,I’m good at killing plants and my soil is pretty terrible. Other things I have successfully kept alive are cat mint (my cat loves this 🤣), a hebe, hostas and budlia. Other things that grow pretty fast are salvias, I bought my mum 2 different ones for her birthday last year and they have grown really quickly and have amazing flowers, one was a hot lips and the other was purple (not sure of the name).

Things are looking a bit brown in my garden and I’m unsure what will spring to life for summer, I am planting some bulbs just incase I have killed a few things 🤣.

I found a viburnum davidii after some googling but a bit put off as you need a male and female plant up get the attractive berries I think That comment surprised me because my lone V davidii does produce berries. So I googled. Viburnums, including V davidii are monoecious ("one household") meaning it doesn't have separate plants for male and female flowers. But all of them have a strong bias towards cross-pollination and aren't very good at fertilising themselves. What this means for you is that you will have better berries if you have two plants but you don't need to worry about whether the plant is male or female because it is both.

The usual context for coloured-stem dogwoods is in a winter garden, so often people underplant with hellebores, which have big attractive leaves and tiny flowers surround by large petal-like bracts which last for months. Then perhaps Rubus cockburniensis or R thibetianus - blackberry relatives with attractive white stems.

Coloured-stem dogwoods don't need to be pruned, but if you cut the stems back in the spring it encourages new, fresh, brightly coloured stems to grow.

There are two methods with dealing with a new garden. The approved method is to plant things at a decent spacing and wait for them all to grow and merge together. The other method is to plant to fill all the space and accept that you will have to remove lots of plants later.

What @Gliblet is hinting at is that you can fill up bare space with temporary planting like annuals, which are going to remove themselves anyway.

I suggest you start thinking about what you like in the way of plants. Do you want flowers in the summer but you're not fussed about the rest of the year, or do you want a garden that looks good in the winter? Do you like perfume? Big blousy flowers or smaller more delicate ones? What colours? Are there any flowers you particularly like? - what is it you like about them? That would enable us to give more targeted suggestions.

It'd also help to know which part of the country you're in, and your soil type. If you pick up a piece of your soil can you roll it into a marble or a worm? Or does it fall apart no matter what you do?

Thank you all so much!

Brilliant about the viburnum - @MereDintofPandiculation do you like yours? Would you recommend? And do you think it’d work well worth dogwoods?

Lots of lovely ideas. I’ll get googling!

@Lovemusic33 ha ha yes I think that’s why I rather unimaginatively got two more dogwoods as I could actually grow it without killing it!!

Ah, ignore me. Mine's V tinus not V davidii. V davidii is an improvement on V tinus.

@MereDintofPandiculation just saw your message from earlier.
I’m in London with clay soil.

Good questions! The garden has a real lack of summer flowers so I think that’s what I’d like. We also want wildlife / bee friendly. For that area I’d like small flowers I think. There’s a small patch of violets in the area so I think purples, pinks and blues and whites would look nice.

It’ll look so bare in winter though if everything except the dogwoods have died back so some winter interest would be good - the viburnum maybe?

But I also putting in a bench further up. This is west facing and gets more sun. Plan is under the bench to put down some bricks we have in some sort of pattern - maybe grow something ground level in the gaps? And I would love something me scented sumner flowering plants around the bench. I’m planning on a trellis on the fence behind the bench with a gold flame (I think!) honeysuckle. Any ideas on ground plants or scented plants for by the bench also gratefully received!!

Thank you!!

For the bricks, what about a creeping thyme? Most of the year, just tiny neat green leaves, then in summer covered with pink flowers loved by bumblebees.

For winter interest look at Viburnum bodnantense, hellebores, perhaps Mahonia.

Summer flowers - repeat-flowering roses will produce flowers most of the summer - have a look at David Austin's website. Another reliable long flowering plant is musk mallow, Malva moschata.

@MereDintofPandiculation thank you so much. Creeping thyme sounds great.

I think the area is too shady for roses as there is an apple tree directly to the west. do you know of any small (knee ish high?) bushy type scented flowering plant that would sort of fall and billow onto the path? That would be ok in partial shade.

Thanks again. I’ll check out those plants you mentioned.

Philadelphus (mock orange) grows well in shade - it's a flowering shrub with glossy dark green leaves and strongly scented white flowers. One prune a year will keep it in shape well enough and stop it overgrowing.

Thank you! Could I keep it quite small? The bench area has a large winter honeysuckle on one side and the acer on the other. So I need something to the side of each of those but that is fairly low to the ground / that won’t compete with the larger shrubs.

As long as you keep it trimmed to start with, yes. The more often you prune it back and make sure it keeps growing green towards the centre of the plant, the less likely it is to get 'leggy' and overgrown.

The RHS website has guides for pruning different kinds of plants - including shrubs.

think the area is too shady for roses as there is an apple tree directly to the west. Some roses cope well with shade. I have a Rosa Mundi along the north wall of the houses, and it's smothered with bloom each year. David Austin says 4hours of sun a day and gives a list of 15 recommendations

do you know of any small (knee ish high?) bushy type scented flowering plant that would sort of fall and billow onto the path? That would be ok in partial shade. You could look at the Nicotianas - from seed or buy small plants each year. I have a small Philadelphus which has never got more than 2ft high. I'm not a good person to ask - my small scented plants are all in the sunny area, and in the shaded area the scent is all coming from about 6ft in the air.

I’ve found this variety of mock orange - Manteau d'Hermine. Looks perfect! Thank you. They look beautiful.

Thanks @MereDintofPandiculation that is good to know. It’s a north facing garden so quite shady but also long. But we have a couple of veg beds up the top. But for a whole other thread!!!

So I think we’ll go with the creeping thyme and the philadelphus for the bench area plus the honeysuckle on a trellis. So that area is looking promising!

I’m still not sure on the dog wood area but that’s more intimidating as it’s lots of empty soil. I think some hellebores and maybe geraniums to add a bit of spring colour. I have so many ideas jotted down now need to spend some time deciding.