Plants for clay soils with catkins and stem colour

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 planting design provides a range of plants that, once established, will thrive in clay soil and provide a variety of interest throughout the year. A simple planting plan helps to create depth, interest and good coverage in a border.

James Lawrence

These plants have been selected because their preferred growing condition is clay soil. By using plants that are naturally adapted to clay, we can reduce the potential problems that are more likely with plants that are less well suited.

The Bergenia and Sanguisorba provide some groundcover and will help prevent erosion of bare soil. The ground cover can also help to reduce soil surface moisture evaporation and suppress weed growth in summer.

Until the plants have filled out, an organic mulch, preferably homemade compost, can help to lock in soil moisture and suppress weeds. Mulches should be spread when the soil is already moist to help trap some of that moisture before it dries out in summer.

1 - Garrya elliptica ‘James Roof’ is an evergreen shrub with leathery leaves and long silver-green catkins. Once established,it can be pruned to clear the lower stems creating room for spring bulbs

These are fleshy, rounded, underground storage organs, usually sold and planted while dormant. Examples include daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, lilies, onions and garlic. The term is often used to cover other underground storage organs, including corms, tubers and rhizomes. or shade loving groundcover plants.

2 - Weigela florida ‘Foliis Purpureis’ is a deciduous

Deciduous refers to plants (mainly trees and shrubs) that lose their leaves seasonally, usually during autumn. This is a natural process triggered by the season's shorter days and lower temperatures and allows plants to conserve energy during the winter months. shrub which has dark red foliage and mauve-pink tubular flowers in spring.

3 - Anemone hupehensis ‘Praecox’ has dusky pink flowers in late summer and autumn, held on tall stems above the lower shrubs.

4 - Deutzia x hybrida ‘Mont Rose’ is a deciduous shrub which has an abundance of pink flowers in late spring and early summer.

5 - Bergenia ‘Sunningdale’ provides an evergreen carpeting edge to the scheme with deep pink spring flowers and thick green foliage, red on the underside.

6 - Sanguisorba ‘Little Angel’ surrounds the shrubs and provides burgundy-coloured drumstick flowers from summer into autumn.

7 - Fuchsia ‘Genii’ has yellow-green leaves and hanging flowers with deep rosy-pink petals and a purple skirt, all summer and autumn.

8 - Cornus sanguinea ‘Magic Flame’ provides great seasonality from summer flowers to autumn foliage colour then to stunning winter stem colour

Clay has excellent water-holding properties and is usually very high in nutrient minerals. It is slower to warm up in spring, but also stays warmer into autumn.

By choosing plants that are well suited to clay soil, you can keep your border looking good and growing well, because plants that are planted in the right place tend to be stronger and more naturally resistant to pests and disease. Once the plants are established, this will also reduce the need for extra inputs that less well-adapted plants might need, such as fertiliser and water.

Clay soils can be extremely heavy and sticky in winter and possibly occasionally flooded, while in summer they may be baked hard with wide cracks. Both of these extremes are hard to work and mean gardening should ideally be avoided in the worst-affected areas. A year-on-year addition of homemade garden 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. will gradually make things easier. However if your plants have adapted to naturally thrive in these conditions, they will grow much better.

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.