Beginner gardening guides - How to Design a Prairie Border for a Small Garden

Garden Ninja shows you how to design a prairie border in a small garden. Prairie borders mimic the Great Plains of America, where grasses and herbaceous flowers take over large drifts of land for a stunning informal planting style However, you don't need acres of land to achieve this in your own garden! Presented by Garden Ninja, Manchesters Garden Designer and blogger Lee Burkhill. He's an RHS Award winning garden designer and expert panellist on BBC Radio Manchester's Saturday morning garden phone in. Why not subscribe to my youtube channel? https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuhMHrXyf2bvga2Mq0DJvwQ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gardenninjadesign/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Garden_Ninja Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/garden_ninja_lee/ hi and welcome back to garden ninja now you may have heard the term prairie planting and today you're in for a treat because I'm going to take a small border and I've designed a prairie planting scheme but not only that I'm going to show you exactly how you can achieve this yourself at home using a mixture of traditional prairie plants so come on let's get cracking! So this is the bed behind me that I'm gonna be planting up today in a prairie fashion now usually prairie planting you probably thinking rolling gardens massive beds full of Grasses, Heleniums Cone flowers, huge swaythes of plants. You can still do it in a small garden and on a budget. So I'm gonna show you today how I can apply the prairie planting scheme to this small area and it's all about plant choices and plant placement so come on let me show you how! So planting up a garden can become expensive quickly especially if you go a bit mad in the garden center buying loads of plants now what I've done is gone to the local nursery and looked at this 'Sale rail' over all the plants of discounting and that's usually because you know the bit past the best or they finish flowering that doesn't bother me so for all these plants like the Achillea and the cone flowers behind me knocked down right and yes some of them have gone past the best and I'm going to prune them up, neaten them and get them in! It saved me a fortune and the next year I'll have an incredible show of flowers. So before I start to lay out the Prairie planting scheme I want some height and drama so I've got two Carpinus trees that are going to be going in, Hornbeams into these two tree pits that I dug here they'll give me the drama and the height that I need and then weave through the prairie plants of scheme give you some top tips on how you can achieve this yourself at home. And as if by magic the two trees are now in and they didn't take me about two to three hours to dig the holes! One of the key features of a prairie border is both a mix of grasses and herbaceous perennials and the way that you space them is key and that's what defines Prairie borders. It's about groups blocks and drifts of plants all together for high impact and that's usually why you do it on a big scale to get bulk mass effect. In a small bed like this we've got between eight to twelve different species and some grasses but again I'm gonna block group them together with the taller plants at the back the shorter towards the front to get with that Prairie feel in a smaller border so I'm gonna carry on laying them out and I'll give you some other tips and how-to arrange your colours. Here's another good example we've got the two different cultivars of Achillea here we have a 'Terracotta' which has a silver foliage and a different cultivar called 'Walther Funcke' at the back both still orange what's slightly different which then blends and draws over towards the Heleniums here so it's all about mass effect of that color so you can see here how the using orange Heleniums throughout the border to link the colours together. So just finish planting the prairie border and I'm really impressed with the results and just to summarize the key points that a prairie border is to limit the plant choices so you're going for fewer specimens of plants and grouping them together I've linked the colours through by using the orange and the white Echinacea and got these pops throughout the border big blocks then use different groups of grasses to stop enough to give the illusion of the wild Prairie border. So this project will probably take you about a weekend to do yourself it's all about restriction of those plant choices if you've liked this video why not subscribe to my youtube channel or stalk me on social media for more garden design how-to hints and tips I've been Garden Ninja, the sun's coming out and it's time for a beer! Happy gardening!