A colourful garden border need not bust the bank; start from seed. Follow this plan and let the ground be your canvas
Making a garden can be very expensive. People often embark on a makeover after moving house, when money is tight, or they splurge on landscaping and then realise they don’t have enough left over for plants, but it is surprising how frugal you can be if you plan ahead and are prepared to spend time raising your own plants. The easy answer is to sow a wildflower mix evenly across the entire bed. A more challenging solution, and the one I am going to talk you through here, is to sow a composition that produces flowers in the first year but includes a balance of perennial and annual plants so that your garden will become less labour intensive every year.
For my plot I’m using a 5m by 2.5m patch of ground, with good sun and drainage, but the plan can be adapted easily if you have more space. The plot has a fence at the back of it and forms part of a larger garden, and the plants I have chosen are fairly well behaved. The planting is free-flowering and painterly.
