If you love your garden, you’ve probably spent a long time thinking about your borders. You want to make them as beautiful as you possibly can so that you can enjoy your garden more the next time summer comes around. 

Knowing exactly how to populate your garden borders, however, can be tricky. In this post, we’re going to take a look at some stunning garden borders so that you can get the most out of the available space in your garden. 

Find Your Inspiration Online

Nobody builds a stunning border from scratch. Almost always, people go online, look for fantastic garden border ideas on Pinterest or Instagram, and then recreate them in their back gardens. 

Of course, you can swap out the odd shrub here or there, but if it’s your first time designing elegant garden borders, then there’s no point recreating the wheel. Try copying first before branching out by yourself. Other people’s gardens aren’t copyrighted!

Choose Durable Hedges

No border would be complete without a hedge. But according to Hedgeplants Heijnen, the type of shrub you ultimately choose matters enormously – no all hedge plants are created equal. 

It turns out that there are a wide variety of different plants from which you can choose: 

• Laurel – deep green and dense
• Thuja – light green, evergreen, and ideal when you want your hedge to grow fast
• Yew – one of the most attractive shrubs, owing to its beautiful, fanned leaves
• Holly – ideal all year round, but particularly appealing in the winter months
• Cypress – fast-growing and helps your garden hold onto its green in the winter. 

Theme Your Plants

If you look at the gardens of the majority of people, you’ll notice something: they lack an overall theme. Themes are important, and they pop up all over the place in design. The reason they work is that they help to bring order to what is otherwise a chaotic environment. Colour schemes help to create visual impact. Often the most successful gardens are those that commit to just two or three colours. 

Keep The Planting Scheme Simple

There’s a temptation to fill each of your beds with dozens of different species. The problem with this is that each plant has its own cycle, watering needs, and resistance to drought. While it might look good in the week after you first plant, over the coming months and years, it may lose its appeal, unless you’re incredibly careful in your selection. In general, it makes sense to keep beds homogenous. Choose the same plants for each and manage them on rotation. 

Use The Colour Wheel

The colour wheel is a godsend for amateur gardeners. It effectively tells you which colours go with each other. The way to use a colour wheel is simple: choose colours which are equidistant from each other. You might, for instance, pick a colour and then select the one opposite. Or you could choose the colours at 12 o’clock, 4 o’clock, and 8 o’clock. If you wanted four colours, you could even go at 12 o’clock, 3 o’clock, 6 o’clock, and 9 o’clock.