Jamie Butterworth on designing borders that flourish

Garden designer Jamie Butterworth, author of What Grows Together and co-designer of the RHS Chelsea Dog Garden with Monty Don shares expert tips on planning borders and combining plants.

In this video, Jamie explains:
How to choose plants that will both look good and thrive together
Simple rules for planning a border that looks good all season
Ready-made “planting recipes” you can copy in your own garden

If you’ve ever wondered which plants really work side by side, this video is packed with practical advice and inspiring ideas.

📖 Find Jamie’s book What Grows Together here https://amzn.to/42BLOmS (affiliate link, see below)
🌿 More design tips on The Middlesized Garden blog https://www.themiddlesizedgarden.co.uk/

00:00 Welcome
00:18 Form Plants: https://www.formplants.com/
01:20 What are the general principles of putting plants together
06:00 How Jamie put the big border at Form Plants together
09:32 Beech and hornbeam topiary balls
10:30 Plant combination recipes

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The secret to a brilliant border is knowing what 
grows together. And that’s the title of a book by garden designer and plantsman Jamie Butterworth. 
It’s Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube channel and blog. And I went to talk to 
Jamie about combining plants at his nursery Form Plants, which is a wonderful place to visit. 
The team and Jamie actually made the offices themselves out of recycled shipping containers. 
And the room dividers are shelves full of vintage gardening books. You may know Jamie because he 
co-designed the dog garden at RHS Chelsea with Monty Don. And indeed, you will see some tails 
wagging in the corner of this video from time to time. Or you may have seen his garden at 
RHS Hampton Court with Anya Lautenbach, the Garden Fairy, or some of his own show gardens. The 
reason why Jamie wrote What Grows Together is that he wanted to emulate another Jamie, Jamie Oliver, 
who had a cookery book called Five Ingredients, which put together very simple recipes that 
people who are time poor or beginners could understand. So that was Jamie’s aim in creating 60 
recipes for putting plants together in What Grows Together. So if you’ve ever gone into a garden 
center and wondered, I wonder what would look good planted next to what? then this conversation 
should have some great tips and ideas for you. So, what are the general principles of putting plants 
together? If you’re going into the garden center, you’ve got your trolley – what do you do? Buy 
my book. Absolutely. No. Joking aside, well, I’ve been gardening and playing with plants my 
entire life, and I work with garden designers and the most amazing planting designers, and I 
have the luxury of doing projects – everything from Chelsea Flower Show with Monte Don through 
to working on the nicest domestic gardens – and everything in between. So I think slowly but 
surely over time I’ve worked out what plants I think both grow well together, because you’re 
looking at two – for they’ve got to look good together but they’ve got to physically be able 
to grow well together, and survive together. So I think the first one is don’t get overwhelmed. 
Plants will die. I’ve been doing this my entire life and I work with people that have been 
doing it for far longer than I have. And fundamentally plants die, and we need to be okay 
with that and accept that some things will work, some things won’t. And actually the things that 
don’t work provide us with an opportunity to plant something else in there. It’s very similar to 
cooking in many ways, but also a little bit more difficult in that it might take six months for you 
to know if you’ve actually got it right or not. But not being afraid of it not working, I think is 
the first hurdle to overcome. Secondly, choosing plants that physically work in the environments 
that you’ve got. So, every garden is slightly different. And I’m very conscious that the moment 
you start saying north facing, south facing, east facing, it can become quite complex. And 
I’ve deliberately tried to stay as clear from as much horticultural jargon as possible in the book. 
So, we don’t go into pH levels necessarily in the main book, but at the back there’s an index that 
says if you like this combination actually just double check you do have these requirements. But 
fundamentally, if you have a sunny garden, making sure that there are plants that like growing 
in sun. If you have a shadier garden, making sure there are plants that tolerate the shade. 
Yes, you can go as deep into it as possible. I worked on a a Korean garden at Chelsea two years 
ago for Jihae Hwang, and she said there’s not four aspects, there’s 12, because each different aspect 
creates its own different aspect. And actually you might be south facing but behind a tree, which 
is all very lovely, but ultimately if you’re planting up a container in your front garden – 
wherever that might be – you can just loosely go: is it sunny, is it shady, and run with it. Then 
what actually looks good together? Well, I guess it’s purely subjective. And there are some rules 
in planting design, and there are books purely on: you should plant this spire with this umbril with 
this dahlia. There are about eight different types of flowers, but I won’t get into that because 
ultimately it is subjective, and I’ve picked the ones that I think grow well together. And 
quite often I think keeping it simple is often the solution. So having if you’ve got say some 
containers in your garden, picking one plant per pot – but having three pots next to each other can 
be much more powerful than trying to cram it full of different plants. Going with perennials that 
will give you much more year after year interest. But also the only way you will know if it does 
look good together other than having a book like this – where you can sort of go: Oh I really like 
the way that this pennisetum and this echinacea look good together – is through trying it, and 
I think is part of the fun. This might sound a bit wishy-washy, but one of my favourite 
things about gardening is what’s to come, and sort of I’m a bit of a dreamer, and I’ve never 
once stood in a garden and gone this is brilliant, this is exactly how….I’m always looking at going 
“Oh, actually, wouldn’t it be lovely to add some more height here, or something tumbling there, 
or a bit more white there?” That’s personal, that’s entirely subjective to me. And so I’m 
always looking at the year ahead and never been quite settled. But I think fundamentally if 
you’re putting plants together yourself, don’t be afraid of getting it wrong. It’s fine. They’re 
plants, and it will go wrong in some instances, but embrace that. Finding plants that will 
grow well together in the space that you have. So fundamentally that if it’s a drought tolerant 
plant, you’re not putting it in a woodland. Just a little bit. But then thirdly, have fun with 
the shapes and the colours. It’s not for me to say you should just have a blue and yellow 
garden. But if you want a blue and yellow garden, that’s brilliant. If you just want a white garden, 
that’s brilliant. If you want to just go with globe shaped flowers, that’s fine. But also, there 
is no wrong way of doing it. So when you’ve done this very beautiful border out the front here, 
how did you put that together? What sort of rules and instincts did you follow? When I’m planting or 
designing planting, and taking this as an example, I consider it almost like a painting, but you’re 
essentially playing in a fourth dimension – so painting is two-dimensional, 3D because we’re 
bringing the plants up, but this border will change and adapt in May. It’ll look completely 
different to what it does now. It looks completely different now to what it did two weeks ago, and in 
a month’s time it will look completely different again. And I always try to – I probably look a bit 
mental when I’m doing it – but try to picture what that border will change for the year. So trying to 
make sure that I’ve got enough interest in there, enough structure in there. So fundamentally 
I started with the trees and the topiary. If you have a decent sized border like the one 
we’ve got out at the front, actually adding structure in there, I think is primarily the best 
starting point, because it adds form, structure, architecture to the space year round. So we’ve got 
cornus kousas in there and then….but actually the cornus kousas haven’t done that well this 
year. But again that’s a learning curve as well. It’s getting hotter and hotter and it’s probably 
a bit too exposed out there. But then we’ve got a mixture of beech balls and hornbeam balls and 
purple beech balls. I love topiary. I think it provides such punctuation to a border, but also 
allows you rhythm within the space and something for the perennials to bounce off. James Alexander 
Sinclair said to me probably about a decade ago, when you’re designing planting, there’s two 
fundamental basics. There’s form, which is your trees and your structure, and there’s fluff, 
which is your perennials. It’s why I call my nursery Form Plants because actually that is the 
barebone starting point to planting up a garden, I think, and so does James. When it came to the 
planting then I was really keen that it was a diverse functional space that provided a beautiful 
entrance to the space – but having structure in the perennials with height and form, through 
plants like miscanthus and grasses, but then height through plants like the verbenas as well, 
and the helianthuses. So it….because it’s a big deep border – it’s about 10 m deep – I’ve got the 
luxury of being able to add quite a bit of height in there. You could absolutely do that at home. 
You probably wouldn’t work on a smaller scale, but when customers come here, I often take them 
out and go: actually ignore the space as a whole, but do that and look at a specific thing. And 
be it the colour combination of that salvia with that echinacea, or be it the form of the wild 
carrot that’s in there in spring bounces off the alliums. It’s the same – I tell people when we 
go to Chelsea Flower Show that actually, yes, the garden as a whole might be lovely in whichever 
garden you’re looking at, but there’s something for everyone in every garden. Actually, you can 
take such inspiration from just going, I really like that or I really like that. Like, we can 
talk about clumps and drifts and different flower types, but more so I’ve had fun, and sometimes 
too much is never enough. And that’s absolutely the principle we’ve applied out there. I sort of 
let loose on the colours and just had a bit of fun. And I had a palette of plants that were left 
over from Hampton Court last year and in need of a home. So, actually, would I necessarily have 
put that many fennels in there? Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t, but I had them so I’ve put them 
in there and they’re working really well. I love, as you do, the beech balls and the hornbeam balls. 
And actually, they’re bigger here than I’ve seen them in the shows and things. They’re impressive 
things in the border, aren’t they? They’re impressive things. And if you have the luxury of 
a budget and you can go out and buy topiary balls, then that’s a beautiful thing. But also, beech is 
such an easily manipulative plant in that you can, if you left it, it would grow into a tree. You can 
clip it into a hedge. You can have it as a ball. You can do just about anything you want with it. 
So, you could start off with an 8 pound shrub from a garden center and grow it into a ball if you 
want to. That’s all somebody’s done with these out there. But we’ve just skipped a bit because 
I’m impatient and gone instant. So we could get our shrub and we can get our clippers. How often 
a year would you clip to get this lovely? I think in its formative stages, once a year would be fine 
to sort of just keep getting the shape and keeping it back in. Maybe a couple of times a year if you 
really want to sort of keep it tightly clipped, and to get a really tight shape in there. But it’s 
not a hard thing to do. So, I think you’re going to show us some recipes, aren’t you? And what 
you’re thinking is on each of those recipes, why they work together. So, shall we go 
across and do that? Let’s do that. Yes, let’s do that. So, Jamie, you’re going to put 
together some recipes for us, aren’t you, with using maybe three or five plants, and tell us how 
they go together, and why you put them together like that – so that we can copy them for our own 
gardens. Absolutely. So yeah, this is literally the premise of the book – looking at what plants 
look good together and will grow together. And actually having a whole nursery of plants to 
choose from can even be really overwhelming for me. And one one of the things that I struggled 
with the most in the book was just pairing it back to six different combinations. So I’ve pulled 
one up here actually as a starting point. And these are just three plants, but three plants 
that individually are brilliant and would grow really well in your garden. So we’ve got rosemary, 
and this is just rosemary officinalis. So it’s an upright one. It’s not a tumbling one. It’s got 
brilliant blue flowers but also great for the kitchen as well. We’ve got catmint which is one 
of my absolute favourite perennials because it just keeps going all year round, pretty much. It 
starts flowering in May and if you cut it back, which is what we’ve done with this plant, cut 
it right back, it will then flower again at this time of year. And if we cut this back again now at 
this time of year, it would come back and flower again in September, October. It smells brilliant. 
Obviously, the cats love it, but the foliage is lovely. The flowers are great. I think against the 
rosemary it’s brilliant. And then I’ve included this sesleria , which is sesleria autumnalis. It’s 
quite a big one actually. Now this in….if we’re looking at a small garden, maybe you don’t have 
the luxury of adding topiary in there or a tree in there. Actually, grasses can add architecture 
and structure into a garden, and sesleria provides a foil for other plants to pop in front of. 
Yes, it’s got these most brilliant seed heads at this time of year. It goes an amazing colour 
in the autumn. So a standalone brilliant plant, but actually with the nepeta coming up through 
it, and then the structure of the rosemary going through it as well – maybe you’d clip the rosemary 
– three individually great plants, but together I think the light lime green of the foliage of the 
sesleria, the silveriness and the blue of this, and also then the silveriness and the blue flowers 
of that, they complement each other really well. They’re going to be quite resilient plants, so 
you don’t need as much water as maybe some other plants. I think they’d look great in most gardens. 
Brilliant. So this is one actually from the book itself, and it’s a very resilient combination – 
I can see that will grow almost anywhere. That’s the idea, and also a fairly timeless combination. 
Sometimes if you’ve got the luxury of space and you want to play with colours, that’s great, 
but sometimes less is more, and keeping the palette really simple and really sophisticated 
can be the way to go. So it’s actually one of my favourite combinations in the book, and 
we use it a lot on clients gardens as well. It’s a yew ball. So this is – I know we talked 
about structure and topiary – actually you can get yew at a really small size. It’s much more 
affordable and I don’t think there’s a balcony or a garden that’s too small that you wouldn’t be 
able to fit this in there. Hakonechloa macra to soften up the edges. This is Japanese forest grass 
and this will grow out to about this sort of size and provide you with lots of fluff and softness. 
And then one of my all-time favourite plants. Some designers have, I think, something called plant 
snobbery whereby if a plant grows really well, it’s really easy to grow, really easy to find, 
they don’t like to use it because it’s probably a bit too easy. But actually, I think erigeron – 
which would probably fall into that – it’s one of the best plants you could possibly use, for all of 
those reasons. It is easy to find, easy to grow, and will just keep looking good all year round. 
So, a really versatile mix that will work hard, easy to grow, but put together – again, really 
simple – but I think looks really good. And actually, I noticed this one needs a clip. So, 
just to show how easy you can sort of just keep these balls in shape. It doesn’t need to be 
a chore. In a matter of minutes, you can have nipped out from your front door and just given 
this a light once-over. And it keeps the gardening fun then as well, doesn’t it, as well when it’s 
nice and easy. And whenever your guests come to visit your house, friends or family, they’re 
going to think this looks great I think. Yeah, I think that’s brilliant. Right. So now number 
three. So this is a really pretty combination. This is for the romantics, I think isn’t it? So 
tell us about how to put this together. I wish I’d have used that description when I wrote the book, 
but that’s a lovely way of putting it. This is a combination of perennials. And perennials are a 
brilliant plant because they come back year after year. But this is more for late summer, early 
autumn, extending the interest of gardens. I think so many times we look at spring, we go out to the 
garden center at Easter, buy plants that flower in May or June, and then there can be a bit of a lag 
for the rest of the year. And I love this time of year – I think it’s one of my favourites, as we’re 
entering sort of like late August, September, October – so a palette of plants that don’t just 
flower at this time of year, but really look good together at this time of year. So we’ve got asters 
here. This is a frikartii monch which is….I mean asters have completely all changed their names, 
and I don’t know nor care for their new names, but good old traditional daisy – which is 
brilliant. And this will – it’s quite a small plant now – but if you planted this now, 
by next year this is going to be up here – give you some real sort of definition and structure in 
there. And it’s obvious pairing, I always think, is this anemone – and this one’s honorine jobert 
– you’ve got andrea atkinson as well. But I think the centres of the anemone versus the aster 
work really well together. Similar flower shape. They’re like little egg yolks. And again, 
Japanese anemones are going to get quite tall, so they’re going to give you good value for money. 
Some frothiness of a gaura. Gauras I tend to treat more like an annual short-lived perennial. If you 
get two years out of a gaura, you’re doing well. But if you can find the plants for five, six quid 
a plant, then actually consider them the same as you would do an annual, or a cosmos, or that sort 
of stuff – or propagate them yourself. Because I think although they don’t live for that long, the 
value for money they give you while they are going is brilliant. This is gaura whirling butterflies, 
and the flowers do look like little whirling butterflies, and it will dance through the rest 
of the planting. Another one of my favourite plants – they’re all my favourite plants, they’re 
all like old friends – agastache blue fortune. And I use agastache. I used agastache at Chelsea in 
the Dog Garden with Monty Don. I’ve used agastache at Hampton Court. And I’ve used agastache in 
projects that needed to look good in September. So, it’s one of those plants that just does great 
all year round, looks after itself. And again, same as we talked about some of the plants 
earlier, if you cut it back, it will come back as well. And the bees and butterflies love 
it. And then this big beast in the background, it’s in quite a big pot, so it’s deceptive, but 
this is miscanthus. And again, the same way we did the sesleria, obviously this much bigger, 
but we’re using the miscanthus here to provide structure and to hold this planting together. 
So, it’s acting as a foil, it’s providing us with form. But also as we head into the winter 
months, we’ll keep this and all the perennials intact. Everything will go that lovely crisp 
chocolaty brown as it fades away into the winter months. And we’ll cut it back in February. So, 
actually, there is only eight or ten weeks a year where this isn’t doing something. And if you were 
to litter this with some spring flowering bulbs, it would look great – well, I think, look great. 
So, a bit more complex than the last one we looked at, but equally when you split it down into its 
component parts, nice and easy to do. And I think one thing that’s worth talking about in terms of 
positioning – what goes where, and how you plant them, putting things into groups, be it a clump of 
three or five proportionate to your space – if you only had a pocket this big, just do ones, because 
actually that’s fine. If you’ve got a border, say this table, actually I’d do three of the anemones, 
I’d do three of the agastaches. If it’s bigger, do groups of 12. Why not? And you’ve given planting 
a when-to-plant advice in the book. With this lot, supposing I was wanting to fill a gap in my 
border now, for this – all of which does flower reasonably late. Could I plant them now in the 
middle of summer or is that just not ideal? It depends how around you’re going to be. The trouble 
with summer is obviously (a) it’s very hot, but also we all tend to go off on holiday. So, 
it’s bad for all that reason. It’s not advisable to do it when it’s a drought because it’s quite 
stressful for a plant. By the time you’ve you bought it, brought it home, put it in the ground, 
it needs a lot of water. So, if you can afford, if you can give it a lot of water, then it’s fine. 
But if you hold on for just another four weeks, the light levels stay roughly the same, but 
the temperatures drop and the ground is much moister and it’s a much better time to plant. 
So my book comes out on the 11th of September, and we did that deliberately because I consider 
that to be the start of the new planting season. And I plant through till April or May – I think 
still fine. We often plant later some years – you sometimes have to – but if you can, autumn’s the 
best I think. Should I mix perennials, shrubs and annuals or keep to one thing? It’s entirely 
subjective. If it was me, I’d always throw a multi-stem tree in there, because I think it helps 
to hold the space a little bit better, and you’ve got to work a little bit harder about it. But 
absolutely, you can mix all three. Absolutely, you could just have a garden of annuals. You could 
just have a garden of perennials. You could just have shrubs. I mean, we’ve gone through eras 
over the years. You and I were just looking at gardening books from decades gone by. And I’m sure 
if we went back to some of the books from the 70s, it would just be about shrubs. And I think where 
we are now – with the luxury of being able to look back on all these different planting designs and 
trends – is actually we can pick and choose what we want to do and nobody’s going to judge us for 
it – or at least I won’t. As Jamie said, trees are a really important element in the design of any 
garden or any border, even in a small garden. And the previous video we did with Jamie, which was 
called Trees for Small Gardens, has been one of the most successful Middle-Sized Garden YouTube 
videos. So, if you’re thinking about choosing a tree for your garden, don’t miss this video coming 
up next. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!