About this box
Annuals give you one glorious summer. Perennials give you a border that comes back every year, fills out as it goes, and costs nothing more once it is in. Buying them in pots soon adds up, but most of the best border perennials grow happily from seed, and The Perennial Border Collection brings together ten of them to plant a whole border from scratch.
The season starts in May with the double pompoms of Aquilegia Barlow and the strawberry-scarlet of Geum Mrs Bradshaw, a cottage favourite for over a century. Early summer brings the huge tissue-paper blooms of Oriental Poppy Fruit Punch, while Linum Blue Flax runs a river of sky blue through the front of the border. From June the summer flowers take over: Salvia Purple Fairy Tale in tiers of violet, Knautia Melton Pastels weaving crimson, coral and lilac pincushions through everything around it, and Penstemon Cambridge Mix, which can still be flowering in November. Late summer belongs to Echinacea Purple Coneflower, the deep mustard plates of Achillea Cloth of Gold, and Agastache Raspberry Daiquiri, which flowers right up to the frosts.
Heights run from 30cm flax at the front to Achillea at well over a metre at the back, so the box plants a border in layers. Penstemon, linum, agastache and salvia will flower in their first summer from an early sowing; the rest build up in year one and flower properly from the second.
Good to know
Oriental poppies are spectacular for two or three weeks, then die back to nothing by midsummer, so plant something beside them to fill the gap. Blue flax is short-lived but self-seeds reliably, so a drift keeps itself going. Achillea Cloth of Gold is a strong mustard-gold and looks best at the warm end of the border, with the agastache and echinacea, rather than beside the cooler blues and lilacs.
Full instructions are printed on every packet. Ten full-sized packets in our signature eco-friendly packaging – a lasting gift for a new home, a retirement or anyone starting a garden from scratch.
