Help with plants sizes

[Laurasanford111]

Hi all!
I am working on garden after moving in, in October. It's a long garden, I'm going for cottage style, I want to work on the borders, I have lots of seed sowing to do for annuals already so don't want to have to sow whatever I want in border as I don't have enough greenhouse space etc, I want to order some plants from crocus.co.uk Nepeta, Gaura, and Verbena bonariensis, I can either get 9cm pots or 2 ltr pots I know the two ltr will be a bigger plant but will It make much difference in terms of planting them out, If I ordered 9cm I'd keep them protected, put in bigger pots before planting, I basically want them to flourish etc by this summer, the 2ltr cost a lot more I'm trying to keep cost down but if it means they will be in good form by this summer then I'm happy to pay more but if the 9cm ones will also flower by this summer then I'll go with them, sorry if this doesn't make sense I don't explain things very well haha

Thank you

Bump

I haven’t grown the Gaura or the Verbena, but my inclination would be go for the 9cm and grow on. It’s still very early in the season.

My son has grown the Nepeta and it went like the clappers, so he was taking cuttings from it in the autumn

The 9cm pots will look tiny when they arrive but I'd go for those. I've not grown gaura before but verbena grow quickly and I'd expect you'll get plenty of flowers by summer time. They also seed everywhere so you'll get some freebies for next year too!

Those are all plants that nurseries will get in as plugs (much smaller than 9cm), and grow up in the same year; they should all flower in the first year. A nursery will sell you something in the summer that they got in a as a plug plant in early spring. Of course, it'll have been in a protective polytunnel so will have been warmer and more protected, but if Crocus is delivering 9cm pots at this time of year, I would go for that. I'm not sure there's much sense in potting them on rather than just planting them, though you'd want to be sure they'd been acclimatised to the cold outside.