So, we have a long narrow garden, it runs East/West, the bed I am looking at runs all along the fence down one side, the north side. It gets morning and evening light. Garden tends to be dry, soil not bad, not massively acid or alkaline.
It has had shrubs and not much else in it since we moved in 10 years ago. Now the whole fence is being redone, and so we have had to work our way all down the fence, cutting back and removing stuff to allow access.
I have dug over the bed and removed loads of ivy, bind weed and brambles at ground level. We have removed a couple of shrubs which have had it, and massively chopped back some others. The neighbours have also massively chopped back some huge shrubs which over shadowed part of it.
So, as you go down that side of the garden, it is about 10m (30 feet) of bed (call it bed 1) Bed is about 1.5 m wide. Then a gap, then a huge tree. (proper full size taller than the house, bronze sycamore).Bed 1 doesn't get shade form this tree.
Then another gap, then my 'woodland bed' which is about 5 m (15 feet) but is only a couple of feet wide, and is in the shade of the big tree, and has a couple of rotten tree stumps in it.
Things that are still in bed 1: two large hypericums (St Johns Wort), some ice plants, a tree mallow (quite small still, planted last year), a lovely tree like shrub (large) which has fab spring flowers, and a low growing euonymous. There is also a lot of euphorbia which I hate and quietly remove as soon as it spreads. And some lovely tall red flowered thing which dies back in winter and reappears every spring.
I am looking for 2 things
- Plants to go in bed 1 between all these shrubs, the bed looks really empty now! But I don't think that there is room for another large shrub, just things to go between or under.
- some nice things to go in the woodland bed, it also now has lots of space. (this is where the bind weed and worst of the brambles were) I have some smaller plants in there, nothing big, bed is very narrow. I love the smaller woodland type plants, I have for example a little cyclamen which I have just refound from under the brambles..
I like gardening, but don't have much time. In our garden the things that do best are generally things which don't need attention, either come up every year, or shrubs/bushes. We are good at pruning and tidying once or twice a year, but rubbish at feed and water. I like to make plants work, so 2 seasons of interest, but I am happy for one of those to be interesting twiggy winter shape. Or, something which flowers away all summer (which is why I like the tree mallow and the hypericums)
Don't care about colour (look, we already have pink, red and yellow, this is not going to be a colour themed bed)
What are your top recommendations? Not too unusual/hard to find/expensive. General good old traditional is fine, there is a reason they became popular!
Thank you!