23 stunning ground cover plants – create a tapestry of colour and texture (in difficult places!)

Tap into Tim and Gillian Ingram’s approach to ground cover under trees or in difficult spots. No more endless weeding of bare patches! Using easy-care plants that spread or self-seed and a light hand with weeding, they have created a tapestry of texture and colour at their garden, Copton Ash.
Many of these plants are widely available around the world and suitable for a wide range of zones and climates, such USDA zones 3-8 or 4-9 (and any UK summer or winter).
00:00 What are ground cover plants?
00:21 Copton Ash: https://coptonash.co.uk/
00:36 National Garden Scheme: https://findagarden.ngs.org.uk/
00:44 Plant Fairs Roadshow – collective of independent specialist nurseries touring beautiful gardens in South East England: https://www.plantfairsroadshow.co.uk/
01:32 Check which plants are invasive in your area (don’t take anyone’s word for it!)
03:15 Start with snowdrops
03:51 Planting under trees
04:19 Cyclamen hederifolium. Hardy down to minus 20C/minus5F
04:39 Brunnera macrophylla (perennial forget-me-not) Hardy to minus 40C/minus 40F
05:01 Hellebores – some are hardy down minus 40C/minus 40F but check varieties where you are.
05:07 Dicentra (Bleeding heart). Hardy down to minus 40C/minus 40F
05:18 Geranium phaeum (Cranesbill) Hardy down to minus 34C/minus 30F
05:31 Smynium perfoliatum (Perfoliate Alexanders) Hardy down to minus 23C/minus 10F
06:48 Lamium maculatum (Spotted dead-nettle) ‘Silver Beacon’ Hardy down to minus 30C/minus 25F
07:15 Polygonatum (Solomon’s Seal) Hardy to minus 40C/minus 40F
07:27 Disporum ‘Night Heron’ Hardy down to minus 28C/minus 20F (not as shown on the video!)
07:49 Arum italicum (Italian Lords & Ladies) Hardy down to minus 28C/minus 20F
08:07 Trilliums – very slow growing! Hardy to minus 15C/5F
08:28 Geranium macrorrhizum – Hardy to minus 40C/minus 40F
09:12 Euphorbia dulcis ‘Chameleon’ Hardy to minus 26C/minus 15F
09:29 Anthriscus Ravenswing (Dark Cow Parsley). Hardy to minus 15C/5F
09:43 Tiarella grandiflora Hardy to minus 28C/minus 20F
09:51 Ferns – thousands of varieties. Look for dryopteris or polystichum ferns for dry shade.
09:59 Impatiens (Busy Lizzie). Hardy to minus 6C/20F
10:20 Mitella ovalis Hardy to minus 23C/minus 10F
10:55 Epimediums Hardy to minus 23C/minus 10F
11.23 Bluebells Hardy to minus 30C/minus 25F
11:44 Viola labradorica (Labrador violet) Hardy to minus 40C/minus 40F
11:51 Ajuga reptans (Bugleweed) Hardy to minus 40C/minus 40F
12 35 What can you grow under a conifer?
13:12 Vinca Major (periwinkle) Hardy down to minus 15C/5F
13:35 6 Flowering Plants that Bloom All Summer: https://youtu.be/xZr4n75Cr6g

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Ground cover plants are defined as plants which are low growing and mat-forming, and they grow in parts of the garden where other plants don’t really want to grow – for example under trees, and in areas of dry shade – and the advantage of using ground cover plants is that it means you don’t have to weed as much, which makes them sound a bit dull, but I’ve just visited a garden called Copton Ash where the owners Tim and Gillian Ingram have created a tapestry of texture and colour using ground cover plants. It’s Alexandra here from The Middle-Sized Garden YouTube channel and blog, and Copton Ash is open for the National Garden Scheme in Kent, and Tim and Gillian also sell their plants – Alpine and woodland plants is what they specialize in – through plant fairs around the southeast of England, via the Plant Fairs Road Show, so that I’ll put those two links into the description below. The secret to these plants is that they spread easily or they self-seed, and the reason why this makes planting plants in difficult places much better is that Tim and Gillian up to a point allow the plants to decide where they’re going to go. They spread and self seed in areas where they’re happy. And you’d be surprised at what will grow in a difficult place if the plant itself is given the freedom to choose. Most of these plants are widely available all over the world, and they’re easy care and they’re very hardy. Many of them hardy down to zones three or four of the United States, up to zones eight or nine, and certainly able to withstand anything that a UK winter or summer can throw at them. I do have one word of warning, and that is that plants that spread or self seed have slightly higher tendency to be invasive in certain areas. There’s no such thing as an invasive plant, but there is very much a thing called an invasive plant in your area. And you do need to check. For example if you’d grown up in the northeast of the United States your grandmother might have told you that lamium (spotted dead nettle) is an invasive plant, and you shouldn’t plant it. But then you move to the UK where it’s a native plant and it’s very useful. So if you go on thinking of it as invasive you would miss out on a lovely plant. So don’t rely on what people tell you – always check the government or local authority advice for where you are, and you can find that online. So let’s go over to the garden and hear Tim’s advice for creating a rich tapestry of color and texture with ground cover plants. The RHS defines ground cover plants as low growing plants which spread quickly so that they cover up soil and they stop weed seeds from germinating, but what’s your view? Well they obviously are, but I tend to think of grand cover plants in a different way, because I like to think of the garden evolving and plants actually integrating together in the sort of meadow-like setting, in a sense. So, the way I think about ground plants is just having plants actually combining and mixing, often self seeding because the garden is very large and it’s quite difficult to, you know, to maintain it in very great detail. And I think it’s a lot more interesting, because if you just have single plants spreading very widely, it’s really not as interesting as having a lot of things mixed together in tapestries. So I love the mix you get in the spring with the wooden plants, where you actually have all sorts of different species coming together in a mix. So for example, we’ve grown a lot of snow drops for many many years, and the result of having the snow drops was of course we could grow other woodland plants in amongst them, that came on later. And so we had this kind of progression through from the winter with the snow drops, and you know you could clear the ground and keep it quite bare, and then you have all these woodland things coming on following the snow drops, filling the ground and making this tapestry. So it’s more the sense of building that kind of community of plants, I think, that I think of ground cover as. I think it’s a little bit like in some ways that the way that Great Dixter works – you know, with this constant succession of different plants coming through one after the other through the year. Taking that when people are thinking about ground cover, they’re often thinking about things under trees and everything. Is there anything special about actually planting the plants in the ground – when you’re dealing with lots of trees and perhaps shrubs and things? Yeah, that’s the advantage of the woodland plants of course, because they’re adapted to that – they’re adapted to the sort of rooty soil – and they grow early before the trees and the shrubs are growing very strongly, you know. So certainly things like cyclamen for example – absolutely perfect, cyclamen hederifolium, which is one of the very best plants in the garden growing through the winter, and then you know going dormant when it gets very dry in the summer. The same is true of bulbs like the snowdrops and such like. So what would you describe as one of your best spring ground covers? I think probably the foremost one will probably be Brunnera macrophylla – the perennial forget-me-not – which is very vigorous, seeds around very freely, flowers for months, and be flowering from sort of mid March through to middle of May. So it goes right through the spring really, and it kind of merges with all the other plants that have come and gone over that period of time. So it just follows along from the snowdrops and the very early things like the hellebores for example. And then there are other things like dicentra, which tends to go summer dormant when it gets very dry, but this time of year it actually makes a kind of full growth right through, you know. It mixes really beautifully with the brunnera. We have a few other things that are very good in dry shade. Geranium phaeum, that seeds around very very well. There’s a famous one called Samobor, which Elizabeth Strangman introduced, with sort of dark markings on the leaf. Mourning Widow, which is excellent. And also another plant we have called smyrnium perfoliatum, which is a monocarpic umbellifer, with these sort of glowing green yellow flowers, which seeds around like mad, and can become a real nuisance, but that’s glorious in the spring, and then it completely disappears in the summer – you know, it disappears under the ground, after it’s flower dies, but all of the seedlings are there under the ground, little sort of tubers. You described these avenues where the fruit trees are, as a sort of tapestry. How did you get that to work, because although there’s certain amount of self-seeded there’s a certain amount of plant mix. It’s a mix of all of those things, yeah, and it’s got a long history in a way because they were planted, those trees, right at the beginning of the garden. So that was 45 years ago. For a long time they were just mulched with straw, or we used weedkiller to control the weeds, which just seemed a, you know, constant battle, trying to fight the weeds. And because they’re quite small trees, on dwarf rootstocks, I thought it’d be a much nicer place to develop woodland plantings, but with you know quite choice woodland plants. So over time we started doing that. And that’s where the snow drops came in, because they were the first things that really were planted – just by sowing the seed-pods of the snowdrops, and allowing the seedlings to begin to develop, and then adding things like hellebores and you know the early flowering things, and then slowly adding a lot more choice woodland plants in amongst those, and trying to get a balance in different areas. So where there are very strong growing things like the brunnera and such like, then you have to have quite strong plants that can compete with that. And then other parts, the more choice things can grow together and make more of a real tapestry. So it’s a kind of constant process really, very like doing a painting I suppose. And what is strong enough to compete with the brunnera? Not a great deal. I mean things can come up through it, so some of the later flowering woodland plants of polygonatum, and disporums and things like that, can actually spear up through that. And some of these lilies, the stronger lilies like lily martagon, and such like. So do you just go in there and weed a bit, weed it out, when it’s getting too…That’s exactly what we do, yeah, when it gets a bit too aggressive, we clear certain areas. We look at it and decide we really would prefer not to have that there, and take out of some clumps of it, and maybe plant something different – and then keep going back. The other plant we’ve got which is become a menace is Arum italicum, which is often grown for those lovely silver markings in the leaf, and that for many years was really nice, and then it started to seed much too generously. And that’s another plant that’s become a bit of a problem, and we’ve been removing that, and when you remove a very big clump of that, of course, you have a nice big space that you can replant with something more interesting – like maybe a geranium, or you know some other choice thing, or Trillium or something like that. So actually geraniums, hardy geraniums, work quite well as ground cover, don’t they? Yes, a lot of those. So we grow a reasonable number of them, like geranium phaeum that I mentioned, and some of the very vigorous ones like oxonianum. Macrorrhizum which is really really good in dry shade – that’s really fantastic ground cover for difficult spots like that. You’ve repeated them, you know, all the way along. Is that deliberate or is it also that they just self-seed? Yes they just self-seed. But it’s nice seeing them. It’s just beginning to sort of go with what happens really, to a certain extent, and you know make use of that. And then have things that can come up through. I think that’s where the ferns are really useful, because they can come up through that, and give a contrast. So what apart from the smyrniums are your favorite self-seeders for ground cover. I suppose it would be things like the brunnera, even though it’s a bit aggressive, because it is so lovely, you know, forget-me-not flowers right through the spring, and just delightful. Just in front of me here actually, there’s a euphorbia called euphorbia dulcis chameleon, which is not exactly a ground cover, but it pops in amongst a lot of other plants just by self-seeding. And it’s got bronzy leaves, so it makes a nice contrast. And the same thing is true of anthriscus Ravenswing, the dark-leaved cow parsley as well. So those things are quite nice because they’re not actually ground cover as such, but they’re merging in with other plants in that tapestry of different plants. And they certainly self-seed very freely. What’s this one? That’s a thing called tiarella, which is in the saxifrage family – tiarella grandiflora. She’s got greeny flowers and seeds around, but makes you know seeds quite nicely. Ferns come up quite nicely through all the different plants. And what’s this one here? This is an annual impatiens which you know just seeds like crazy really, and flowers into the summer, but almost becomes too much of a good thing there I think. So that’s in the busy lizzie family is it? Yes. So that’s amazing. Actually a lot of saxifrage plants in the saxifrage family which do quite nicely. So that that little mitella. Ah this little one here? Yeah, with the double-flowered buttercup. And you can see there, there’s geranium phaeum seedlings that have come up in amongst here as well, dotted around, so it’s quite a mix and the impatiens which have come in right from over there somewhere, starting to spread. And then the hellebores are very good aren’t they – ground cover for this, because they’ve got these deep strong roots and they’re you know they’re really well adapted to woodland shade. And when it gets dry in the summer, they can tolerate that really well. And they flower so early, so they’d be flowering along with the snowdrops, and then they carry on through to about now really, as they begin to set seed. But there are a lot of choice things as well. So epimediums here which have rather striking leaves, and these little flowers which are a bit like aquilegia flowers in some ways. They’re herbaceous members of the berberis family, so quite an interesting plant with beautiful foliage some of them. The other plant that does self-sow quite a lot now, and may become a nuisance in the future, is the bluebell, which we have as the you know the wild native bluebell. But unfortunately we also have the hybrid one, and the kind of European bluebell coming in as well – so which is a bit of a nuisance. And you know once they really get going, they can take over quite a little of space. But they mix quite nicely. Oh the ajuga, yes. Because that’s working very well – the ajuga and the viola together – are working really well as a ground cover over there. Yeah, the purple-leaved ajuga reptans purpurea and the viola labradorica, which kind of merge together in the mix along with the euphorbia dulcis. And the ajuga is an incredibly tolerant thing, because it grows sort of under the sort of skirt of all sorts of other plants that come on later. So it can tolerate the cover of a lot of perennials that grow into the summer. So in a very dry bulb bed that we have in the middle of the garden here, which later on actually gets full of lots of eryngium bourgatii, the pyrenean plant with these sort of spiky blue metallic flowers, and valerian and various things like that and the sedums, and the ajuga sits around underneath those you know, and then appears again the following year about this time of year when it’s actually in flower. So it’s a very useful plant. You can even grow it sometimes in sort of light meadows in the grass, you know, where the grass is not too strong, so those spires of blue are rather delightful really. What people often ask is what can you grow under a conifer in really dry shade. And looking at round here, would you say that one of the things you can do is to actually raise the branches? Or what’s your advice? That’s certainly what we have done. Yes. Really dry shade under conifers is exceptionally difficult. You know there are a few things that, some of the cyclamens for example, can take it quite well. If it’s really really difficult then only ivy and a few things like that can really tolerate it. But where we got smaller conifers, and just nearby here quite a lot of things will grow there for a while. The early growing things – you know like bulbs and this ranunculus and other things like that – come the summer when it gets really dry, they’re not that many things that can cope with that. So it tends to be things like bulbs that flower in either the Autumn or through the winter and the early spring. If you’re interested in plants that work really hard in your garden, then don’t miss this video here with six flowering plants that bloom all summer. And thank you for watching. Goodbye!