Starting a herbaceous border

Jay, lots of herbaceous perennials are happy on clay soil. For example, just look at Monty's garden (Longmeadow) on Gardener's World.

Why don't you start a thread of your own and ask for advice and suggestions?

New thread started for Jay

Thought I was going mad there for a minute! Thanks guys.

Well now. You can do it the quick way or the cheap way.

The cheap way is to get seeds of all the herbaceous perennials you can find. You get loads of plants, the biggest downside is that most of them won't flower the first year. No worries, you can prepare the bed (spread whatever organic matter you have handy, it will make the clay soil workable) and fill in with annuals from seed while the perennials are developing.

My planting schemes are a bit haphazard, I can never work out what's going to look good in advance. Plant in blocks with 3, 5 or 7 plants in each block. Big ones mostly towards the back of the border, small ones mostly at the front. Then I keep messing with it year-on-year. Stuff that doesn't thrive gets moved or chucked. Stuff that clashes with a neighbour gets moved.

The quick way involves buying lots of plants in the spring. But you do need quite a lot if you are going to plant in blocks. For rough estimate of quantity, you want to space your plants about a foot apart each way.

Or you can mix and match, do most from seeds in the first year but buy a few nice individual plants to start things off as specimens among the annuals. The great thing about most herbaceous perennials is that you can bulk them up over time for free. Divide a clump every couple of years and treble your plants. Only a few are short-lived and need to be replaced (e.g. hollyhocks and foxgloves and sweet williams will often do a second year but they aren't as good, better to treat them as biennials).

Maintenance of a herbaceous border is mostly weeding during the season, cut the dead stuff down to the ground in winter, llift and divide plants in spring as they are starting to grow, spread more organic stuff while you're in there. Also move anything that you want in a different place at the same time.

Stand by for some different opinions...

I would say that it's vital to remove all perennial weeds, Thistles, Twitch, Bindweed etc.. before you plant anything.

If you don't you will have a devils job on and will probably fail :-(
I can't think of any herbaceous perennial that are as competitive as the above.
Annual weeds are easy to remove with the old hoe :-)
Good luck, nothing compares with a herbaceous border!

I'm more of a 'suck-it-and-see' gardener.

When I planted my very first herbaceous border, I didn't even know what it was called. My neighbour of the time, who was in that line of work, used to give me shrubs, so I planted them. I did a bit of g**gling first - luckily most of the plants had labels - and just bunged 'em in to my lovely thick clay, removing the couch grass as I went.

Everything grew.

The trouble started when I covered the whole border in thick rich horse manure. I then spent the next ten years battling thistles, docks and nettles.

I moved things that got too big for their allotted space, and pruned what I could.

I wish I still had that garden.

Wyvale (& other garden centres probably) are having a sale at the moment half price perennials. This rhs links good,you can refine your search of perennials by ticking the boxes that match your garden needs eg evergreen,north facing....
https://www.rhs.org.uk/plants/perennials

Thanks all! JJ, that's a great link, thank you! I was looking on the internet last night and found a website where they show you a border plan and send you the relevant plants for it. ( ready made borders). That would be a big help for a first timer.

I wish I had a bigger garden. When I had the use of my parents garden for veg growing I used my own garden for flowers, including a herbaceous border. When I could no longer use my prents garden I dug out all my flowers and now grow Dahlias in my front garden and annuals in my window boxes.
Good luck with your project Jay.

We decided we were going to have a herbaceous border in our new garden, so I took advantage of the 36 free perennials offer that T&M ran at the back end of last year and they are all currently filling out nicely in the greenhouse.

There are quite a few plants that love clay. I have Thames Valley clay and its hell to work with but the roses love it. In the end I decided to have raised beds so I wasnt so restricted in the range of plants I could grow. The best aspect of clay is that it is very fertile. You could always add tonnes of homemade compost and builders sand which I have done over the years to open the soil up. That works

Jay if you are thinking of growing your choice from seed, as Martin said it may be next year before you start to see your results, I would suggest that you buy some packs of the cheap plants and bulbs on offer in some of the big grocery chains, or pound shops etc. if you want a lot of colour this year use dahlia tubers, if you just let them grow without disbudding they will give you lots of flower heads, (plant them about eight inches deep and you may get them back up next year) what ever you put in, work in some course sand in the planting area to help with drainage.