Sometimes as a garden lover you just want the sight of a beautiful garden – that sweeping view of plants and space and color and form all working together to create that ephemeral thing we call a beautiful garden. Could be a cottage garden, could be a Japanese garden, could even be a kitchen garden – doesn’t matter – it just has to be lovely to look at in your eyes. Yes, we want healthy soil, yes, we want healthy plants, yes, we want sustainable and regionally appropriate gardens, but let’s face it – what most of us gardeners are after is pure beauty. Which in gardens as in people, is much more than skin deep. Photo: A view down a long Mixed Border at Skylake Gardens in Durham. The border works together as a whole unit with colors and shapes repeated through the trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials that Christy has chosen. The most noticeable repetitions change throughout the year as different combinations of plants come to the fore, and then fade back. The rounded Carolina Cherry shrubs form the protective and aesthetic backdrop for the border.

One sure way to get that killer Cover-of-a Glossy-Garden-Magazine effecy is with a well-designed Mixed Border. A Mixed Border can be a gardener’s best friend in terms of garden design elements. Done well – it will give you pause for admiration over and over again throughout the gardening year.

Mixed Borders are perhaps a bit more difficult to implement than glossy magazine photos of good ones might suggest, but they are also not so difficult that you should not consider one in your next garden, or your next garden make-over. Where an Herbaceous Border relies almost completely on herbaceous perennials (flowering plants that die back to the ground in winter, but return again each spring) and is far and away strongest in the peak summer months, and an Annual Bedding relies on fresh annual plantings each summer, or even two or three times a summer, a Mixed Border is just that: a section of the garden which consists of a mix of all kinds of garden plants, including trees, shrubs, sub-shrubs, vines, perennials annuals and bulbs, that are designed to work together as a whole. Photo: A small planting combination in the formal White Garden and patio area just off the back of Gail Brown’s house. This garden was planned not only to be predominantly white: featuring white flowers or white foliage, but to also be especially fragrant. The structural backbone trees and shrubs include a white treed-up Wisteria, and white-edged holly leafed Osmanthus, and many, many white roses. Here white Watsonia is center and pops beside the red foliage of a Berberis.

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