A stunning easy care Perennial Garden

A stunning, easy care perennial garden can provide you with so much colour and delight and be easy to care for. However, you need to select good performing perennials that have been bred to perform.

There is a lot of pressure on plant breeders these days to produce plants that will basically flower for up to 9 months of the year, need no spraying for pests and diseases and need little general maintenance to keep it looking good. The photo is of a local garden that I helped create from scratch in June 2013. This photo shows the great floral display five months later. We used Camellia Earl Pearly (Topiary Standards) to give the garden some structure and continuit. Under these we planted a themed patchwork of colourful perennials, to give year round colour.

We put a trellis through the middle of the garden, because this particular garden is in quite a high wind zone and this did several things to the garden. It broke the garden up, so you couldn't see from one end to the other, which i think is a good thing. It also gave us a climbing frame, which we put climbing roses and sweet peas on the trellis so that they intertwined through each other. When the fragrant sweet peas finally finish, the roses will still be in full flower, so the colour and blooms will continue on for the rest of the season.

Many people are scared that a colourful perennial garden like this is a lot of hard work, but its not if you follow the basics:

• Select only the very best performing perennials
• Mulch the ground, so that you virtually have no weeding
• Over the very hot summer months, give the garden a good soaking once a week
• Feed the garden every September and March with a slow release fertiliser