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

granjura we stayed on Av. Rodrigues de Freitas, 427, 4000-423. Quite close to the Sao Bento train station. (The very ornate one). It's not a huge city so you can just wander round looking at the sites as you see them. The view from the bridge at night, with all the lights reflecting on the water, is beautiful.

I thought my pyracantha were the most useful - all year round either berries or flowers or fresh green leaves and the thorns kept the badgers and foxes out of my small garden. Then, for the first time, a thug of a gull found them and took all the berries over two days. I hope it got a stomach ache.

My roses give the most pleasure. The flowering season can be extended by mixing the flowering periods or getting continuous flowering breeds, not the same as repeat flowering. They don't take much looking after, a good feed in March and July - chicken poo pellets are as good as expensive rose feed. Prune in late Autumn if your garden is windy so the roots aren't too damaged, or spring if you are sheltered. You can deadhead when needed, or, as I do, instead of just cutting off the dead flower, cut the stem down to an emerging new growth. Prune as you go!
Roses are very forgiving. My best ones have been bought as half dead sale items at garden centres for next to nothing and nursed back to life. I don't go to expensive and chic garden centres. I have never managed to propagate a rose but I don't have a greenhouse.
Only sweet peas have as good a fragrance and are as beautiful as roses but are much more work. I think most cottage garden plants are a lot of work to look really nice and healthy - more than I want to give.

The geranium endressii (Wargrave pink) flowers from late May until the end of the year in my garden. Nothing affects it, slugs and snails ignore it, as do greenfly and fungal problems. It can be propagated from tiny sections of root so you can bulk it up quickly and once settled it seeds happily. It makes excellent groundcover and is wonderful covering the bare ground around roses.

Penstemon, blue salvia, lavender and dark leaved dahlias.flower from now till September and then the Japanese anemones. I'm no gardener, but I do like full borders. Even I can't kill these plants....and the dahlias have come back for the last several years without lifting them in the winter. And heucheras and sedums, love them all.

Mimulus Mine have spread and appearing all over this year
I love sweet pea's

I have various penstemons and they flower all summer in a variety of colours, definitely my favourite after my roses.

Agree about perennial wallflowers, we have purple one that was in flower at the end of August when we moved to this house, went on until November. It then came into flower in February and looks as if it's going to flower all summer

The plants that need least attention in my garden are Hellebores. They seed themselves with great abandon - pink and white ones, and I've recently acquired a couple of blue ones.

Violas which I planted in March and will continue to bloom through to first frost and a hosta which needs no attention and pops up year after year.

A blue hellebore?? That's interesting, I've never seen a blue one. What variety is it?

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/201606/medium-873492-dsc-0067.jpg https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/201606/medium-618400-dsc-0068.jpg

I love my heucheras and my honey spurge. Oh and my herbs!

I live in North Yorkshire and have horrible clay 'soil', so although I love gardening it isn't always easy! Bulbs and most lavenders I've grown have a habit of rotting over winter if it's cold, wet (or both!) but plants that come back each year and look good are perennial geraniums, herbs like rosemary, sage and thyme survive well and are useful for cooking plus have nice flowers.

Last year I got some Geums, and they survived the winter and are looking marvellous.

I love my Sea Holly (erignium I think it's called?) bought because my daughter's called Holly but it comes back year after year and has a beautiful blue colour.

Astilbies and flag irises do well in a border with clay soil that's either dry and baked or waterlogged (frogs/toads jump out at me when I'm attempting to weed!).

Do bulbs not count as perennials, I just love my daffs and tulips

previous pic was my DGD hiding

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.

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.

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.

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

"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!)

Flip! I've been calling him GrandTea

(Specsavers)

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.

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

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.