How to Create Colorful Flower Borders🌷🌼 | Talk & Tour with Cape Cottage Garden #gardentour

In this Talk & Tour, Kristin gets a tour of Heather Thomas’ stunning Cape Cottage Garden in New Jersey. Heather shares her smart tips to create flower borders full of colorful blooms from spring through fall! Watch to learn about her “4 C’s” for design success. Read more about Heather’s garden featured in our 2024 May/June issue of Garden Gate Magazine.

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hello everyone I am lucky enough to be here with Heather Thomas in her New Jersey Garden this morning hey Heather hi thanks for having us today thanks for coming by I can’t wait for to show everyone um you can just see a glimpse of it right now but Heather has a really interesting approach to plant combinations and also um just a lot of stories to tell us so let’s start a little bit let’s start talking a little bit about the beginnings of this garden and the entrance here sure so we started the garden about 7 years ago a couple years after we moved in and I was trying to figure out where do we begin with this garden and then fate had it that a tree that was right here had to be taken down and it was sitting in a bed of pandra and when the tree came out it the whole spot was bathed in light which is sort of a rare thing in this Garden so I thought that’s where I’m going to start and so my husband and I decided to pull the pakist Sandra out which was it was like pulling something out of concrete it was such a hard task what a project yeah and so it was so difficult that my husband never came out and gardened again no so I lost my husband to cause at that point but it was a good spot not only because of the light but I’m able to see it out of my kitchen window so I was able to enjoy it right and the other thing I did initially was put in this Archway right here and what it does I think it really draws the eye as you come down the driveway and it creates that sense of entrance into the site it really does it really draws people forward from the driveway down right into the garden so let’s go take a look great oh my goodness so beautiful and there’s just so many different things going on at once but I know this is not I mean there’s something going on all the time right there is yeah one of the things that people say about this Garden is that it has this continuous flow over time and I thought maybe I could share a little bit about how I’ve accomplished that absolutely let’s start so so you so you’re a professional communicator so you obviously have lots of good ways to to encapsulate ideas and make them really clear I want to hear more about it oh well great thank you so much so there’s really four techniques I think that I’ve applied in this Garden that weren’t apparent to me when I was building the garden but when I look back I can see oh you know these are the four things I really did that achieve that continuity of color right okay the first thing we can talk about is the first and they’re all C’s all right easy to remember the first one is really this idea of companion planting now if you are a vegetable Gardener you might think of companion planting as oh I’m going to plant my basil with my tomatoes right right or the three sisters concept but here I’ve taken that concept and I’ve sort of thought about it as pairing a spring with a summer and a fall plant as I plant it in so I’m always pairing things that are going to bloom at in the different seasons because it’s so easy when you go to the garden center in the spring to buy whatever is blooming at the time and then everything in your Garden ends up looking you know at its peak all at the same all at the same time I know it’s we get so tempted by that so try to resist that you know par AO with an aster and you’re good right right exactly yeah so in this Garden for example so in this little area right here what are some of the plants that you’ve been you know combining here sure sure so in early spring you could probably guess what I have a lot of right here tulips a lot of tulips I think they’re so magical and love to see the garden wake up from the winter and I really go to town with the Tulips not just here but all through the garden it’s just such a great way to Splash color through so what comes after the Tulips great well the next to bloom are really these are Hardy geraniums here this is Johnson’s blue and there’s just a cloud of blue that runs through the space at the time the other thing that and we just missed it that blooms after the Tulips is our Cletus which drap the art and really bring a lot of color to the late May time frame and it’s really a stunning I it’s one of those moments I look forward to every year like my tulips I love when the Claus blooms it’s almost like every um every month is better than the next then there’s always something to look forward the goal that’s the goal so and then as we roll into um well we’re here in early June right now so you can kind of see what’s happening in the garden right now so we have the iris the irises betia and the Roses really have a big presence in this Garden at the time as well and so you kind of have this this scene and then we have some peonies here and there still dotting the garden that’s really nice and then what’s next what comes after this yeah so as we roll into summer here’s da for example and we have yo in the spot and then right there we have flocks oh and so you’re really picking up the yellow gets kind of introduced at this time which you’ve got lots of Pinks and um you know this is kind of a yellowish white as well coming in and then by Fall yeah fall here we have this is Blue Beard K opterus that creates blue spikes in the garden and then this is turtle head shelone that brings that pink and blue but in the fall form perfect that’s great that just really keeps it going and then um you mentioned that you um bring some dalas in as well sometimes I do yeah so I actually grow my doas in grow bags so what that allows me to do is in the fall I’ll sort of take a look at where the gaps are and there’s so much foliage to hide the grow bags I’m able to actually tuck tuck in those dalas here in there such just a magenta one that would have been here last fall I love that that is such a smart way to uh grow to bring that color in and tuck them in just where they where you need it idea so so your color combination here is very much uh pinks and blues right now do you keep that so you kind of keep that color going through the whole through the whole year really I do you know I think if you have a color combination that you really like there’s a lot of things you can do to kind of keep that same color going let me actually show you one way that I do that okay all right so here’s an example of how I’ve kept the color going so this is silene uh Red Campion and it really takes off for me in late April and it’s still blooming now and here we are in early June but it’s about to kind of go over so what I’ve done here is if you take a look at this flocks it carries the same exact color palette and in fact the same form exactly and it will pick right up where that camp in leaves off so if you’re trying to achieve multiple um seasons of the same look you can search for plants that carry similar form and color and and the flower shapes are even the same I mean amazing actually that’s a great Point yeah that’s really what a smart thing to do and you um and then you have these little Salvia the Salvia spikes back here yes so what was blooming along this bed just recently was mcar so these blue spikes I really like that look and what I found here this is a Salvia called Spring King and spring King is one of the earliest blooming salvas and so it has almost exactly the same form and it picks up right where the mcari Le so they just transition right right into one another what a great idea that’s really interesting I hadn’t thought about it that way before thanks so this leads us into the next SEA of your philosophy yes exactly um the next next is carryover plants right meaning you know we all have those times when our Gardens sort of sink and don’t look as great as they could and so what carryover plants do are the they’re blooming in the interstitial moments and this silene here is a great example because it carries me right from the Tulips to the peonies and and even through the Roses that’s really smart so just look look for plants that are blooming when nothing else is in your garden and so you can really kind of transition it from WI season to the other seamlessly exactly and over the last seven years you just sort of look around and think oh there’s a dead spot here what can I fill in and over time I’ve been able to layer it in to keep the the show going that’s really smart I I just can’t believe I’m I’m captured by these pansies here and how they’re still blooming in June they look they look fantastic and they’re also huge well I love pansies so I really baby my pansies I really baby them so what do you do to Baby them well I keep de heading them and I fertilize them okay which really keeps them going and then the other thing I do is if we’ll get a really hot day so it was 94° here last week which is not good for pansies no no they don’t like that but if I if I find if I put like a little umbrella over them I’ve been known to do that um it really carries them through and takes the heat off or the other tool I use for this is is really the row floating row covers the right the light light colored sh sh fro and so if I find that something’s about to be hit by a blast of heat I will just roll out some of those shade covers row covers and really it gives the chance the plants a chance to succeed just temporarily because then when the weather improves again they’ll be fine it’s just um that one day that could really hurt things day yeah so the next day after 94 deg it was 67 and are happy and they were happy so I find that with my hydranges as well well you know in the in the early spring when they’re coming along and then you get that late Frost I just force myself to go out there and cover them and I find if I do that I’m thanking myself in June when they’re blw y you’re never you’re never sorry you did that never never lots of good cases for that so you you mentioned that um shade cloth is a great that’s a great tool to have in your Arsenal it is you know it’s funny I was thinking if I could only have three tools with me from the garden what would they be well they would be my felco which are in here uhuh um my I love um I have a DeWalt drill 20 volt Dewalt drill with a ball Bogger which I use for everything not just bulbs okay what else do you use it for well just to put any smallish plant in the ground toen yeah almost anything that’s yeah smart that’s good and then and then this row cover cloth because I use it so many times to help bring plants through either the Heat or the cold it is versatile I hadn’t thought about it that way that you could use it on you know almost any time throughout the year it could be really useful yeah I’m always bringing it out smart yeah well let’s take a look at the next uh the next C in your philosophy that sounds great all right so our next C yes is containers containers okay yeah and one of the things I’ve been able to sprinkle around this Garden are a lot of containers in the beds I see that you have a lot of really beautiful ones and some of them are hidden too they are they are I’m a big fan of using containers and of course they’re able to allow you to bring a spot of color to a spot that maybe is having some downtime I think that’s a great idea so right here you have this um this pot you’ve raised up these really pretty calibra coas and just pop some color in I see there’s a budia behind it yes and that’s exactly why I put the pot right here so the budia obviously is going to fill out it’ll take 3 to 4 feet of airspace but not right now and so right because they peak in late summer and fall it’ll be exactly much bigger right and so I have a pair of parallel pots actually in this bed that are carrying this function of creating a little interest in this spot and I think containers are good if you have a little Gap here and there you can pop a container in yeah sometimes even the the geraniums I’ll able you know they’ll stay in their pots for the first couple weeks of life and I’ll just pop them around the garden before I commit to a spot that’s so flexible it yes and that’s the whole point about containers they really are flexible so do you think so would you move this one when the budia gets larger in the fall I could in fact last fall I actually was able to put a different set of pots into this bed because there was another a different Gap okay and this was able to come out so that’s the thing about containers you can really use them and have complete flexibility in where you’re placing them and you you were mentioning a little secret about uh how you put plants in containers even I do I do because again I want to be able to move these containers Kristen so here’s what I’ll do I’ll show you here this for example is a pot within a pot oh smart and so so uh you just put a prop inside the pot to get the plant at the height um that is the right height for that plant exactly was this a premixed uh container that you picked up at the Garden Center it was it was one of these popping po pop in and drop containers and I it has a big root ball so I felt like I could I didn’t have to plant it in dirt that’s so smart and I don’t have anything heavy wing me down for later if I want to move this container it makes it really easy to move things around that’s smart reallyy and the other thing I can do is so let’s say when fall happens if I wanted to keep this here I could always trade out a mum for example and just pop it right in or move the containers somewhere else or if yeah if the plants go down for some reason if you have cool season plants that don’t like the heat exactly just slide it out pop something else in exactly and I have a lot of those containers in different forms all through the garden that’s really smart and it really creates that continuity of color that’s right so that’s the third C is containers let’s talk about the fourth one okay the fourth one is really picking your cultivars carefully to have a a range of early mids and lates okay and I got into this really it was tulips were my Gateway MH and when I first had tulips in this Garden they were only blooming for maybe 10 days so I began a quest to really figure out how how I can get a lot of more blue so you start with the earliest tulips and then grow midseason and then late and and really just stretch it out so how many weeks of tulips do you have going in this Garden definitely four many years five and I’ve gotten up to maybe 5 and a half depending on if it rains that very last week you know it’s game over but um I’m able to get almost five weeks of tulip that’s good so what are some of the other plants that you um do that with well let’s talk about aliums there’s a lot of aliums here so it’s really amazing the range of Bloom times you can get within one species or or type of flow so alium season really begins for us with purple sensation and Everest which gone over now but there but you can still see their seed heads here yes and I find them interesting so I actually leave them I love how you have them all mixed together with different um in different stages of development I think that’s really pretty because you’re right aliums look great when they’re finished blooming still they do they do so the next aliums to bloom for hus here are glob master and Gladiator okay and then what we just started was Ambassador which are the tall purple ones as well and then right here this is actually another alium called graceful and this is what opens next in the garden all right yeah and then after that in another section of the garden I have the drumsticks drum drumstick aliums as well which come next and then um at some point if you wanted to grow the summer blooming aliums like Millennium or summer beauty or something that would that would carry it through as well so I mean you could really have months and months of aliums blooming exactly and get that shape and that color exactly throughout the whole the whole the whole year almost exactly and so what it does when you’re really thinking about how do I have early mids and lates of different varieties it just creates these waves of continuous color and that really yeah it helps you U maintain your color theme and also uh it yeah the continuity of the shape and aliens have such a yeah distinctive shape that that really that’s smart and you can do the same with uh Salvia yes so we looked a little while ago at the fact that I have Salvia spring King o have kadana and I have blue hill and I have Blue Marble but I start off with spring King right because it’s the first type and the same thing with nepas so over here I have like for example this is Walker low and this is Persian blue but in another part of the garden I have a uh a NEPA and it’s called Uh early bird and it’s one of the earliest nepas so what I’ve done is I’ve done this across the garden and it really creates the same form warm in different seasons yeah I like that I like that idea of looking for varieties that have the word early or you can usually tell by the variety name can’t you right so for example there’s April night and may night exactly that’s really so names yeah so use the names a little bit to to help um guide you yeah yeah there’s so much information online too yeah right that’s so interesting yeah I can’t wait to see more of the garden and hear um more about the the design theories that you kind of employed as you were um developing this space um let’s go take a look okay great so we talked about the entrance bed and how you lost a tree and had a lot of P that had a lot of pakist Sandra under it what did the rest of this space look like at that time not very good not very good so we had an old children’s Treehouse from the prior owners and they had really used this place it’s sort of an outdoor playroom there was a fire pit with burned burned area around it zip lines all through the space it looked really nothing like it does now and I sort started there and I’ve beautified as I’ve as I moved down this space what a transformation it’s a little different now a little different yeah so um so how did you decide on the shapes and the this you know how to use this exact space yeah sure so I think many of us have the side Garden issue of sort of it could be just a bowling alley and I really thought about you know how do I make this space interesting and so really have designed a series of figure AES in this space and I think what it does is it really creates a sense of movement as your eye moves down there’s so much interest that gets layered upon layer true it’s true and and you’re really sharp having having really sharp crisp edges really crisp you know really defines it nicely here it does yeah so the arbor bed over here was started about 7 years ago or so and this is a newer space here how old how old is this part of the garden I started this a year and a half ago oh wow so um how did you get things going so quickly let me show you let’s walk over there and take a look okay I started a year and a half ago by putting this Arbor in okay and it was a gift from my grandparents and as I worked through the garden space here you know my grandfather was really financially disciplined and very frugal so I thought you know how do I really honor him in the arch um his name was Quinton and I decided what I would do in this space is really populated largely with cuting seedlings divisions in other words I shopped in my own garden to fill most of this garden shop in your own garden yeah right right so you have um we have the kerodon Salvia over here yeah yeah I find that really easy to divide and in Fall when I’m you know I work the whole garden to put in my tulips so it’s right there and I’m able to you know take the salvas all the salvas in this space are really things that came from other parts of the garden that’s the the great thing about um when you keep adding on um there’s you can definitely shop your own garden you can shop your own garden and then it also uh gives such a sense of repetition and it it just creates um a great sense of continuity throughout the garden it really does and as we get to this spot the color palette changes a little bit I introduced some of the orange that you’ve seen in the pansies yes but the the blues and the purples are unified throughout the whole Space it really adds that continuity the other things I were able to bring in for example the irises I was was able to bring in from other parts the dayes are another example dayes are great to divide they I know and they need it too they do yeah and then this siline over here as well you know we looked at it a little bit earlier but it’s also one that breaks apart really easily so I’ve just been slowly filling the space so so you um took cuting from siline or did you do seeds no I actually just broke the plant apart and did a division so easy it just almost comes apart at the scams oh interesting very very easily and it transplants so well you mentioned that the pandra in the first bed was so difficult to get out so what’s your soil like here well this is a good example right here when I started this bed I had a feeling it would be clay but it was like Boulders of clay like Play-Doh almost clay no fun so yeah and what I did to create this bed was in the back row I did no dig I laid cardboard and just put it right over the grass and then the front layer of this I did dig out the grass cuz I wanted to put two TPS in so I was able to as I was plant before I planted the Tulips really enrich the soil which is really the foundation of where everything starts in this Garden yep and that’s how you make things take off more I mean exactly they they’ll Thrive so much more so what did you bring in I see the they bmed a little bit Yeah so did you bring in soil from outside or how did you do that yeah so I I have three comp three huge compost piles I was able to tap into that and then I just added a lot of store-bought compost as well really enriching the soil as I do perfect these containers are really dramatic coming down this path it’s really pretty oh well thank you actually they serve a purpose so I think we all have these challenge spots in our garden and this was definitely one it gets this beautiful dappled light all morning long and then at around 1 or 2:00 it gets blasted by the full sun oh no so what you’d think would be a part traditionally a part shade spot that that doesn’t feel that way to the plants that live here it doesn’t and you know if you look at most plants when they say you know part sun or part shade what they really want is they want Morning Sun and afternoon shade so more gentle light more gentle light so it was really difficult to figure out what to do in the space and then I kind of hid upon an idea okay so that’s where these containers came in yes exactly so these are pink diamond you know hydranges in tree form and they can take a little bit of shade but they really like the sun and what I’m hoping to do here is create a canopy of of dappled light so that the plants underneath have a little break from that afternoon heat that’s really smart so that’ll just make it easier for everything to um thrive in this yeah part- shade spot you’ll give them real part shade kind they like yeah and these guys will grow maybe two feet more on either side and so I’m hoping and they’ll they’ll grow a little bit taller I think as well so and how fun to walk through this pathway and have this little Archway of of uh tree standard um hyres really with happy plants underneath exactly and beautiful too yes so and theads to a interesting place that I’d like you to people um I just think it’s such a smart idea let’s take a look at that let’s go take a look so this is where all the magic happens yes welcome to my my backstage area this is perfect yeah you can’t you can’t tell it’s here no from the other side there’s this interesting hedge here that’s hiding your work area and it’s just right here it is you know I don’t think many of us would buy a house without closets or being in a kitchen that had no storage and so I think one of the things that you have to think about with garden design is you know where am I going to create a workpace right and as I laid the garden out here um I realized that by bumping the for cyia hedge out a little bit from the wall I could create this space which I really like so this is your potting area it’s your um spot where you can grow you have some strawberries growing in pot here um you have your irrigation so it’s really easy to take care of and you you mentioned dalas earlier is this where you start your dalas exactly so I again I I do them in grow bags and so I put the grow bags in the containers and I’m able to kind of grow them on here until they get a little that’s that’s really um ingenious and so um you can use it as storage potting all kinds of things yeah yeah the other thing that I use the space for in addition to Growing some vegetables here and there is tell me if this has ever happened to you you go to the garden center and you bring home a plant and you’re intending to plant it right but you never get to it right away so I have a lot of extra irrigation um hookups here and I can just you know pot put the pot over here and like feed it in yeah feed it in and keep it watered until I find the time to actually plant it definitely happened to me sometimes they stay for years oh my gosh for years wow don’t do that yeah so this is a great little space and like you said it’s it is really hidden away and so it’s a great space where all the untidy stuff or even some pretty stuff yeah I think it’s a great idea so we’re hidden behind this hedge here tell me about how you created the Hedge sure one of the things this Garden had a lot of was for CIA I mean it was rambling wild all through not only this space but other spaces in the garden and you know again trying to think about how you’re how to be economical How To Be Frugal I thought well I have a lot of it I wonder if I could put it to the test so I was able to have this planted here and I just continually clipped it to to create this thick Lush hedge just a formal a formal Foria hedge and so it doesn’t it does it Bloom sometimes Bloom sometimes doesn’t a little bit I keep it pretty clipped so I’m not really growing it so much for the bloom although we get a little bit yeah right but um it just has a nice shape and it follows the shape of the beds here I see it um has that kind of interesting undulating shape to it but yet a very formal feel because you keep does you keep it clipped and I was able to use something that we had in abundance here anyway right that makes so much sense Heather thank you so much for this amazing tour I learned a lot of tips I think I’ll use in my own garden well great you’ll have to let me know how it goes I’d like to do that I would you can see what Heather’s Garden looks like throughout the year on her website Cape cottag garden.com or follow Cape Cottage Garden on Instagram