Hedging and Edging
Germander Hedge
Hedging and edging with herbs is a good way to smarten up your garden
and give some definition to your beds and borders.
In fact all flower beds benefit from an edging and many herbs are ideal for this task, decorative as well as useful!
Gravelled areas, terraces and decking often need plants to soften the edges,
and flower beds and vegetable growing areas will be defined by a neat edge.
- The coloured sages - purple and gold variegated Icterina - make small billowing shrubs which disguise hard lines with their foliage and have the added advantage that they need little or no pruning or dead heading to stay in shape. Catmint is another herb which will lessen the hard lines in the garden with a mass of purple flower spires in summer.
- Edible edges in the vegetable garden or potager would be most appropriate. Parsley and chives give a smart upright edging through most months of the year. Alpine strawberries are also very attractive with their white flowers and scarlet fruits contrasting with the bright green leaves.
- Thymes, winter savory and hyssop all attract bees to their flowers, making them ideal to plant alongside peas and beans to encourage pollination.
- Hyssop is also a good companion plant for brassicas, as it is thought to deter the cabbage white butterflies whose caterpillars can destroy your crop.
- A row of small upright thyme bushes makes a neat finish to any border alongside a path. The varieties Silver Posie and lemon variegated will smell delightful as you brush past.
- Finally, for a spring flowering area, what better edging than our native sweet violets. Neat clumps to bright green leaves are topped with masses of sweetly scented flowers, contrasting beautifully with the yellow of the spring daffodils.
Hedges are just a taller version of edges!
- Traditionally, dwarf lavenders such as Hidcote and pink flowered cultivars have been used as low growing hedges, both at the edge of taller borders or at the sides of pathways and drives.
- Most gardeners will be familiar with cotton lavender (Santolina) used as a clipped low hedge in knot and formal herb gardens. Although individually the leaves are a grey-green in colour, en masse they give a silver effect when mature, making them excellent to edge paths that you might use at night. The bright green form of cotton lavender - Santolina virens - is another attractive option.
- More unusual and very underrated is a hyssop hedge, rather like a green lavender plant with flowers of brilliant blue in July and August, a hedge of hyssop will draw all the bees and butterflies in the neighbourhood.
- Rosemary makes taller and more formal hedge, good as a divider between different garden areas. The variety Miss Jessop's Upright, as the name suggests, is erect in habit with elegant green foliage and lovely flowers in the spring.
- Hedge Germander also makes a neat low hedge. It is an uncommon herb which is gaining in popularity over the last few years, justly so as its shiny green leaves and rosy pink flowers make it an effective hedging choice.
Many of our herbs, with their neat habit and attractive appearance, make that ideal finishing touch to your beds and borders. In addition they are practical too, with culinary, cosmetic and medicinal uses.