Sixty metres of herbaceous border, held through July

A long straight path between two beds that had been mown grass for a generation. The owners wanted the full English border — and knew enough to know it is more work than it looks in a photograph.

The herbaceous layer is one storey of the section, and on its own it is a demanding one: it flowers hard, then collapses, then has to be cut back and divided. We planted in drifts by succession so the border reads full from May to October, and wrote the maintenance down to a single page rather than a mystery.

The soil came first. A herbaceous border is only as good as the top spit, and this one took a hundred and twenty tonnes of composted green waste before a plant went in.