Beautiful Gardens WONDERFUL wallflow s

Loved by foraging bees, pastel-hued wallflowers create a feast of early spring colour

Perennial and biennial wallflowers are the perfect plants to kick off the growing season. The small spikes of ruffled blooms are gently fragranced and, once in bloom, they flower for several months from March onwards – especially if you snip off the fading flowerheads. The individual four-petalled flowers are also very pollinatorfriendly. Erysimums provide butterflies and bees – especially bumble bees – with a welcome source of pollen and nectar in spring before many other flowers appear. They can be grown in full sun or dappled shade, and they’re equally happy in pots and borders. The shorter varieties that we’ve shown here are particularly suitable for containers as they only grow to around 45cm tall.

How To Care For Your Wallflowers

Choose a sheltered spot in full sun or light shade, in well-drained soil or peat-free compost – wallflowers don’t like wet, heavy soil

Water wallflowers in pots when the compost is dry, but don’t let the roots get waterlogged

Prune the whole plant back to half its size after flowering finishes – this will help to maintain a neat shape and encourage fresh foliage

Beautiful Gardens

DESIGN A BORDER FOR w dlife

Attract more bees, butterflies and birds to your garden with our suggestions for a wildlife-friendly border

Making your garden more appealing to wildlife doesn’t mean letting it go completely wild. Simple changes like letting your lawn grass grow longer between cuts, leaving small gaps in your fence for hedgehogs to pass through, and planting more nectarrich flowers can make a big difference to the creatures that live in, or travel through, your garden. Here, we’ve put together an easy-to-grow collection of border plants that look beautiful and keep garden wildlife safe and well, too. Add nesting boxes, a bee hotel, a bird feeder, and a few log piles from fallen twigs and prunings, and you should have a border teeming with wildlife.