The best flower borders in Britain, and how they work their magic

British gardeners can take pride in two of our greatest inventions: landscape parks and herbaceous borders. The landscape movement was a development of the old deer parks, but we owe the borders to our mild, damp climate and our love of flowers. The history of herbaceous borders goes back a long way. In the 18th century, Philip Miller clumped different plants together for ornamental effect at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and, by 1800, our ancestors were making mixed borders of shrubs and hardy plants.

It was the writings of William Robinson and, especially, of Gertrude Jekyll, however, that turned herbaceous borders into essential features of any respectable country garden. Jekyll’s books Colour in the Flower Garden (1908) and Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden (1919), both of th