Summer is the season when gardens truly come to life. Long, sunny days encourage plants to flourish, flowers to bloom, and outdoor spaces to become a vibrant extension of the home. Whether you’re refreshing your borders, adding colour to patios and containers, or creating a relaxing space to enjoy with family and friends, we know that the right plants can make all the difference.
We have everything you need to create instant colour in the garden from beautiful seasonal bedding bursting with colour to fragrant favourites that fill the air with summer scent.
Fill the Gaps with Summer Bedding
Refresh your borders with vibrant summer-flowering plants that are already in bloom! Some of our seasonal favourites include:
Petunias
These prolific bloomers are perfect for hanging baskets, window boxes and containers, and produce masses of vibrant flowers throughout the summer, with a wide range of colours, they’re ideal for creating eye-catching displays.
Geraniums
A classic summer favourite, loved for their bright, cheerful flowers, drought tolerance and exceptionally long flowering season. They’re easy to care for and thrive in beds, borders and patio pots.
Salvias
Elegant upright spikes of vivid flowers provide height, structure and long-lasting colour in borders and containers. Their nectar-rich blooms are also a favourite with bees and other pollinators. We stock favourites such as ‘Hot lips’ and ‘Clotted cream.’
Dahlias
We do love our Dahlias and stock a wide range of varieties from dramatic dinner-plate blooms to the more compact, dainty varieties. Flowering from midsummer until the first frosts, they offer an incredible range of colours, shapes and sizes to suit any garden. By mixing flower shapes, heights and colours, you can create borders that look full, balanced and professionally designed.
Spruce up Statement Containers
If you’re short on space or simply want to brighten a patio, balcony or entrance, containers offer one of the easiest ways to create eye-catching displays. We have some fantastic large , light weight pots in Poly two, that would perfectly suit being filled with colourful flowers that will instantly soften hard landscaping and create focal points around seating areas or doorways, they’re also incredibly versatile, allowing you to rearrange displays whenever you fancy a change.
When Planting Containers, Think Layers:
Choose a central taller plant for height, such as the dramatic vertical structure of verbena bonariensis or salvias varieties. Add rounded, colourful plants for fullness, such as geraniums, lobelia or pansies. Finish with trailing plants that spill gracefully over the edges, great options for this include the likes of petunias, bacopa or ivy. This simple formula creates professional-looking arrangements every time. Don’t forget to use a quality compost and ensure containers have good drainage. During hot weather, pots dry out much faster than garden borders, so regular watering is essential.
Refresh Hanging Baskets
Nothing says summer quite like overflowing hanging baskets. Whether suspended outside your front door, along a fence or beneath a pergola, baskets packed with flowering plants create impact and welcome visitors with a splash of colour. Mix flowering favourites such as petunias, fuchsias, bacopa and lobelia for displays that cascade beautifully over the sides, we have an array of plants that are simply perfect for hanging baskets in our glass house! If you’re not sure which plants to choose from, our friendly plant team are on hand to offer help and advice.
Create Your Own Hanging Basket
Check out our step-by-step video tutorial and follow along as we show you how to create a beautiful summer hanging basket. From choosing the right plants to arranging and planting them, our easy-to-follow guide will help you put together a vibrant display that’s perfect for brightening up your garden, patio, or front door.
Don’t Forget the Foliage
While flowers naturally hold the spotlight, colourful foliage plants are perfect for creating attractive displays too! Plants with silver, lime green, burgundy or variegated leaves provide contrast and interest, making neighbouring flowers appear even more vibrant. Heucheras, coleus and ornamental grasses all complement traditional bedding plants by adding texture and depth to containers and borders.
Gardening for Pollinators
A colourful garden isn’t just enjoyable for us it also provides an important food source for bees, butterflies and other beneficial insects. In the plant area you will find many popular summer flowers that are not only rich in nectar and pollen but also beautiful such as lavender, verbena, salvia, echinacea and rudbeckia. Watching bees busily collecting nectar and butterflies fluttering between flowers is one of the great pleasures of summer gardening!
Keep Your Garden Flowering for Longer
A little routine maintenance makes a huge difference to the longevity of your displays, here are a few simple jobs that keep plants performing at their best, these simple tasks only take a few minutes but reward you with months of continuous colour.
Deadhead faded flowers regularly to encourage new buds.
Water deeply during prolonged dry periods rather than little and often.
Feed flowering plants every one to two weeks with a high-potash fertiliser.
Remove damaged leaves and spent stems to keep plants looking tidy.
Check containers frequently, as they dry out much faster than garden beds.
Creating a beautiful summer garden doesn’t have to involve major landscaping or months of planning, even replacing a handful of tired plants, refreshing a few containers or adding a vibrant hanging basket can dramatically change the feel of your outdoor space.
Whether you prefer bold colours, soft pastel shades or a classic cottage garden style, we stock a wide range of plants to suit every style of garden. Don’t forget, our knowledgeable team is always happy to offer advice on choosing the right plants for your garden, containers or borders, including suitable composts or feeds.