Which plant in your garden have you found to be the most useful?

Don't worry greyduster

I may owe you an apology, grannyknot; perhaps it was another gardening thread, as I can't find it now!

I thought we had talked about pot marigolds further up the thread? We have the opposite situation to you - DH loves it; I have had to retain some this year just to appease him!

No one has mentioned calendula

We planted some a few years ago in the "wildflower garden" we established outside our front gate on Council owned property (guerrilla gardening) and it comes back year after year showering glorious bright sunny colour everywhere. It has gifted itself all over the neighbourhood, I even saw a clump on the top of the flatroof garage a few houses down from us. I love it but husband curses it for taking over, and spends days digging out the new ones each year. The calendula wins though!

I do wish you hadn't shown me that Nellie I counted 16 heucheras in my quite small garden!

I love London Pride, it reminds me of gardening with my Pop.

This foxglove and the red geums were all planted last year and survived the winter (in a raised bed, so the soil isn't too claggy!) which I was very pleased about.

As you can see my garden isn't colour co-ordinated, anything goes if it grows!

Crocus.com have a post Chelsea sale. I got some lovely perennial violas from there last year.

That is such a sweet little geranium nelliem.

Bags love buttercups in the countryside. They are letting them grow more on the verges down here these days.

I'm wishing for more space in my garden!

That viburnum sounds great!

I think most people would regard my garden as wild and weedy. That's very useful for supporting wildlife and it's useful to me for the pleasure it gives me in seeing, for instance, waves of buttercups, and in having a chance to study the plants and the creatures.

This thread is an incitement to spend even more money on plants.

Kittylester On Saturday I was dragged off screaming (not very loudly though) by my 84yr old choir mentor to look at this place. (She gave me lunch later on.)

She had found they had a post Chelsea open day and they hold the National collection of Heuchera and some similar plants.
They do a lot of mail order and are only about 4.5 miles from my home.

www.plantagogo.com/ If you are interested.

I bought this most beautiful small geranium. Geranium Sanguinea Elke. As well as some more Heuchera.

As for "useful" what I am using a lot of at the moment is London Pride which makes excellent attractive and easily dug up ground cover. It spreads fairly easily and is very good at supressing weeds.

I have some sisyrinchium striatum ( tinyurl.com/jl8qxpx ) planted in gravel. Last year it flowered from June through to the end of October. I have no idea what variety it is as it came from my sister's garden. It's not spectacular but it's very useful.

I also love my Viburnum Bodnantense Dawn. It starts flowering in late autumn and goes all the way through to April with a succession of pink, scented, flowers. Very welcome in winter. It's not a particularly shapely shrub but it survives pruning well.

I garden on awful S. Durham clay; the only way I can get some things, such as rosemary, to survive is by planting them in gravel. Plants love it; so do seeds!

gulligranny if you grow heuchera in pots watch out for vine weevil, the grubs eat the roots, one of my pots of heuchera was like a wig all the foliage came off, when I emptied the pot I fed the grubs to the robin.

Ours is somewhat like that G&T, not exactly a cottage garden but one that goes it's own way with very little interference from us and offering up surprises on a regular basis.

Our garden has morphed over 45 years into a cottage garden. We get constant surprises when plants we had forgotten about show their heads.

Yes Jing GnT, is much easier, really wish I could go back to Pompa, might ask GNHQ, but I might also be asking for trouble. Pompa is my real life name to my GC, it goes back several generations.

(Specsavers)

Flip! I've been calling him GrandTea

"Clematis, for the, look at that, I forgotten we had that one."

Love it!

Agree with your post G&Tea. (that's a darned hard name to type out btw!)

Hardy geraniums, huge variety, aquilegia -come back year after year and always different.

How do you pick one plant out

Roses, for versatility and fragrance
Pink, for fragrance
Sunflowers for the happy WOW factor
Clematis, for the, look at that, I forgotten we had that one.
Alpines for close up beauty.
Bulbs for heralding the spring.

Yes, bulbs definitely count. Love a garden in Spring. Tulips are probably my favourite flower. But they must be the old fashioned neat and tidy ones. Not the ragged open ones you get these days.

ja I'm not sure that picture is Wargrave. It looks a bit light in colour. Wargrave is the brighter pink one in this pic.

That's a lovely pic of your DGD ethel
I agree, bulbs are very useful. I have a lot of montbretia in my garden which appears to be indestructible. I like agapanthus too. The two of them together always remind me of holidays in Cornwall.