bloooooooom Eight o's. Don't count, bookmark. Plan a bed

Plants with spires: vertical accents

Plants with upright spires of flower, the exclamation marks of a border, and how to place them.

Most plants are mounds. A spire, a tall upright stem of flower, is the exclamation mark among them: foxgloves, salvias, veronicas, lupines, delphiniums. The eye jumps from one to the next, so a few spires repeated along a bed give it rhythm.

Place them singly or in threes, and repeat them; never in a solid block, which turns punctuation into a wall. The planner treats most of them as accents and dots them along the bed.

220 plants: 177 perennials, 12 bulbs, 9 grasses and 22 shrubs.

The dozen to start with

  • Blue false indigo

    Blue false indigo

    4 ft · late May to mid June · host plant

    Spikes of indigo-blue pea flowers in late spring on a plant that grows as big as a shrub, with blue-green leaves and black seed pods that rattle in winter.

  • Delphinium

    Delphinium

    5 ft · late June to mid July

    The great blue spire of the English border: dense columns of flowers up to head height in early summer.

  • Catmint 'Walker's Low'

    Catmint 'Walker's Low'

    24 in · mid May to mid September

    A tough, drought-tolerant mound of soft grey-green leaves and lavender-blue flowers that bees love.

  • Japanese pachysandra

    Japanese pachysandra

    8 in · grown for its leaves

    Whorls of glossy, toothed, evergreen leaves form a uniform carpet under trees.

  • Rosemary

    Rosemary

    4 ft · early March to early May

    The kitchen herb: a dense, aromatic, evergreen shrub with needle-like leaves and small, pale blue flowers from late winter into spring.

  • Hyacinth

    Hyacinth

    10 in · mid April to early May

    Dense, waxy spikes of intensely fragrant flowers in blue, purple, pink, white or soft yellow, in mid-spring.

  • Chaste tree

    Chaste tree

    11½ ft · early July to early September

    A large shrub or small, multi-stemmed tree with aromatic, grey-green, fingered leaves and long spikes of lavender-blue flowers in the heat of summer, loved by bees and butterflies.

  • Grape hyacinth

    Grape hyacinth

    6 in · mid April to early May

    Tight spikes of cobalt-blue beads that make a river of colour under taller spring bulbs.

  • Blue fescue 'Elijah Blue'

    Blue fescue 'Elijah Blue'

    10 in · grown for its leaves

    A tight, spiky hemisphere of fine, powder-blue leaves that holds its colour through the summer better than other blue fescues.

  • Butterfly bush 'Blue Chip'

    Butterfly bush 'Blue Chip'

    2½ ft · early July to early October

    A knee-high butterfly bush that sets almost no seed.

  • Yucca 'Color Guard'

    2½ ft · late June to mid July · host plant

    A yucca with a broad, creamy-gold stripe down the centre of each sword-shaped leaf, flushed pink and coral in cold weather.

  • Gladiolus

    4 ft · mid July to early September

    Tall, one-sided spikes of large, ruffled flowers in almost every colour.

All 220 plants

Show all 220, by where they go in a bed

Front of a bed 65

Middle of a bed 93

Back of a bed 62

Related guides