Border planting

[isettled]

Garden is NW facing but due to positioning of other houses gets a fair amount of sun for most of the day. The borders are currently very sparse and have a few petunias a so d mini conifer looking bushes planted up. DH and I are both pretty clueless when it comes to gardening. Can I ask for easy care options that will also look nice planted up?

I love Salvias and Penstomens. They are pretty cottage garden like plants that flower from June until late frosts, very easy to look after and come back year after year.

Astrantia, Alstromeria, day lilies are cottagey plants. Don’t forget to plant some bulbs in the Autumn, for a spring display.

Geraniums (the cranesbill ones not the other ones) are easy , you can usually get two goes of flowers from them if you cut them back after the first flowering. Then they come back year after year. Also easy to divide and make more plants.

Crocosmia is lovely, looks after itself.

Euphorbia has got a lot of varieties, it self seeds and can be thuggish and not a good idea if you have young children as you need to be careful of the sap.

Second penstemons, so many lovely flower colours available and so robust and reliable! And geraniums are very easy going and not much trouble.

I'd also look for some evergreen plants, as most of the abovementioned plants are herbaceous and lose their top growth at the end of the year. So you don't have a border that looks like a blasted heathland in winter, I'd put in a few shrubs like Euonymous, Pittosporum 'Irene Paterson', Photinia 'Red Robin', Pieris 'Flaming Silver' or Leucothoe Scarletta 'Zeblid'. None of those get too massive and can be trimmed to keep them neat.

You could also put in a small tree, or an obelisk that you can grow a climber on, to add height.

You could also fill in the spaces near the front with bulbs. There are amazing varieties of daffodils available, lovely to cut for in the house.

I second hardy geraniums. Also geums are trouble free and pretty, and phlox subulata for filling in the gaps between taller plants.

If your soil drains well, lavender and rosemary are pretty hassle free, if it doesn't, dicentra spectabilis is a reliable perennial and very pretty.

And if your soil is alkaline, pinks - fragrant, pretty grey-green foliage and seem to be unbothered by bugs and slugs.

As a novice but enthusiastic gardener, I tend to buy a job lot of mixed plug bedding plants each year and enjoy bringing them on and seeing what’s what. More as a learning exercise than an expectation of 100% success rate

Penstemons, snapdragons for me (south east) are reliably perennial and self seed.
Roses, geum, heuchera, Hardy geranium, fuchsia

That's you for the suggestions....I posted this at work and promptly forgot all about it!
Lots of suggestions, the borders will soon be looking less sorry for themselves.