Sensory garden plants: red and white

James Lawrence, RHS Principal Horticultural Advisor, has designed this simple, attractive, and most importantly, sustainable border design for you to try at home with plants that are easy to grow, widely available and look good together. 

This simple sensory planting design features a combination of flowering shrubs and perennials

Perennials are plants that live for multiple years. They come in all shapes and sizes and fill our gardens with colourful flowers and ornamental foliage. Many are hardy and can survive outdoors all year round, while less hardy types need protection over winter. The term herbaceous perennial is used to describe long-lived plants without a permanent woody structure (they die back to ground level each autumn), distinguishing them from trees, shrubs and sub-shrubs. that will provide extra sensory stimulation, including fragrance and splashes of red colour. Once established, they will thrive together to provide interest throughout the year.

James Lawrence

These plants help to stimulate the senses within a small space. While the Ribes provides edible berries, the Salvia, Artemesia and Thymus provide scent. The flowers on the Olearia and Salvia bring splashes of colour and the Stipa will move in the breeze, inviting you to the feel the foliage.

The Olearia, Ribes, Salvia and Thymus all have the additional benefit of attracting pollinators to the garden.

The proximity of the plants and the spreading habit of the Thymus help to cover the bare soil, helping to conserve moisture and making it more difficult for weed seeds to germinate.

Using an organic mulch, preferably homemade compost, while the plants establish can help to provide the same benefits. Avoid spreading bagged potting compost

Can refer to either home-made garden compost or seed/potting compost: • Garden compost is a soil improver made from decomposed plant waste, usually in a compost bin or heap. It is added to soil to improve its fertility, structure and water-holding capacity. Seed or potting composts are used for growing seedlings or plants in containers - a wide range of commercially produced peat-free composts are available, made from a mix of various ingredients, such as loam, composted bark, coir and sand, although you can mix your own. on beds and borders. Mulches should be spread when the soil is already moist to help trap some of that moisture before it dries out in summer.

1 - Olearia macrodonta provides an evergreen foil for the planting with small, scalloped, slightly spiny leaves. Broad heads of white daisy-like flowers open in summer.

2 - Ribes rubrum ‘Jonkheer van Tets’ has scented foliage and clusters of small green flowers, which develop into short strings of glossy, edible redcurrants in summer.

3 - Stipa ichu is a grass with bright green, arching leaves, and white, feathery, plume-like flowers that stand all winter.

4 - Salvia ‘Hot Lips’ is a semi-evergreen sub-shrub with scented green leaves and flowers that are initially red, then bicoloured red and white in summer, and finally all white by autumn.

5 - Artemisia arborescensis an evergreen sub-shrub with finely divided silver-green leaves. It has small yellow flowers in summer.

6 - Thymus vulgaris is a spreading, evergreen ground cover sub-shrub with fragrant leaves. In summer, it produces terminal spikes of small white or mauve-pink flowers.

Sensory planting is designed to stimulate the senses of smell, sound, taste, and touch as well as simply sight. They tempt a visitor to view plants at close range, to reach out and touch, to inhale a fragrance, to listen to gentle noise and to actively experience the garden with all their senses.

By choosing plants that are good for senses, you can improve mood and general wellbeing. The sensory attributes of plants allow people to engage with the environment around them in a way that is meaningful and beneficial to their mind and body.

Using the ethos of ‘right plant, right place’ to create a sustainable planting combination is great for the environment. It helps avoid waste and the use of products and practices needed to try and help ailing plants, such as the application of fertiliser. It also creates robust, long-lived planting that benefits soil health and garden biodiversity

The variety of living organisms (plants, animals, fungi and microorganisms) in a particular environment. Boosting the biodiversity of your garden has many benefits, including supporting wildlife, improving soil health and reducing the likelihood of pest and disease problems. . For more information about sustainable gardening, please see the RHS Sustainability Strategy.