I’d like to recreate this idea, what plants are these?

[FolornLawn]

I recognise sea holly and lavender, but what are the others? Identifications gratefully received!

LI think that is lovely. The rounded ones look like Hebe and the little red one might be Sanguisorba or maybe circium.

Smartplant app is your friend

I think silver one might be artemisia silver queen or the curry plant. There are some really good examples of this type of planting on Piet Oudolf site

The bright green one next to the lavender might be some sort of euonymus- but even if that's not what's in the photo they might be suitable for the same effect.

The one just peeping in at the right hand side with soft silvery leaves and deep pink flowers looks like lychnis coronaria.

I love it too, it’s sort of a mixture of Japanese and seasidey. I wondered if the two on the left are pinus mugo or something like it.

Thanks for the names so far, I’ll look them up.

I also love the pebbles and the spaces between the plants. Would it be a fools errand to do this without membrane? Isn’t it supposed to be better for the soil to not use it? I suppose it could also look nice with mulch but my garden is so windy it blows everywhere.

Back right looks like a Euphorbia, poss E. myrsinites.

Yes you'll need a membrane. A pebble base is a lovely habitat for seedlings, no competition.My only worry about membrane is 20 years down the line, when it's getting brittle and disintegrating. More plastic into the environment.

Hmm, that doesn’t sound like a road I want to go down.

Good spotting re the euphorbia. I have a couple of those (different type) who could maybe dupe in.

This is exciting! I was thinking in the shady bit of the garden I could keep the style going with some shade tolerant grasses and a sarcococca or two. Would that work?

I was thinking in the shady bit of the garden I could keep the style going with some shade tolerant grasses and a sarcococca or two. Would that work? It would work for a time. Look at sedges rather than grasses, there aren't many grasses which enjoy shade. But even sedges can get large with time, and the relative dampness of shade would allow ferns to take hold. We did similar with a 6ft strip between greenhouse and hedge, we were trying to create a pebbly beach look leading down to the pond and terrace. It was perfect for a couple of years, with lots of round pebbles and occasional tufts of sedges - blue, bronze, and green edged in white. However we started to get harts-tongue fern on the retaining wall of the greenhouse, then self seeded Sisyrhynchium, and the sedges flourished. So now after 20 years it's equally lovely, with all-year-round sedges and ferns and summer Sisyrhynchium, along with Linaria purpurea, Mecanopsis cambrica, foxglove. It still looks great, but it isn't what we had in mind.

Echinops, lavender, possibly a hebe

I have done it with stones and without membrane, but it was a very small area (about 15 feet by 3 or 4) and I dug it over well, removed most roots and hand-weeded it regular in the first summer. If it was a bigger area I would have used membrane, but having had to deal with badly done 10 year old membrane covering my entire back garden I will never use it!

After two summers nothing can grow under the lavender. I also have a prostrate rosemary, a couple of phlox's and some pinks of various sizes, as well as a edging of small sedums, all of which keep weeds away. It looks lovely, but i suspect will need a major overhaul every couple of years as the bigger things get leggy.

Don't plant any self-seeding grasses unless you simply want a rather fancy lawn

Another suggestion for the silver plant at the back is Santolina.

Thanks all! Mere, I love ferns and have a few, plus some meconopsis Cambrica. How do I get both sides of the garden to look like a unified planting scheme? Are there some plants of this type that I can use in both sun and shade to pull the design together?

The sedges will probably grow in both.-++kl
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You're fine to do it without membrane if you have more depth of stones

I did something similar before and only got very occasional weeds - and the ones that did manage to poke through could be pulled out very easily as they were just leggy with no roots (as they tend to be very shallow roots as they're trying to reach for the light)

I will also never use plastic membrane again as I used it on my allotment and it 'shattered' like silk after only 4 years - awful stuff

I agree with the various plant IDs. As MereDint says, old, crumbling membrane is a pain to deal with, so I'd be inclined to manage without and deal with the extra weeding. If you saw Monty's programmes on Japanese gardens, you'll know that hand weeding is very contemplative and very zen!

Oh I’d love an actual Japanese garden but we’re too exposed for acers. I’ll have a look at Monty for gravel wrangling tips though.

I couldn’t reproduce a Japanese garden here either, but Monty’s programmes had some ideas which I’ll be adopting in spirit. The Japanese notion of ma or the space between things (as far as I understand it) helps with spacing of plants, for example.

Yes! That's what I struggle with. It's so difficult to know how much space to leave, particularly when plants need time to grow.

I also struggle with hiding bits of the garden, as ours is short and wide. Grr.

I’ve always gone for dense planting, to provide less space for the weeds to colonise, but even after all these years I often forget how large things will get, so that quite quickly dense planting becomes overplanting and I need to remove things. Hence my interest in ma.