Advice sought for wall-top solution

Greetings,

I am a very novice gardener, trying to choose the right plant for a very specific applicaiton.

In my garden, there is a wall that separates the grill area from the rest of the garden. The wall is about two feet high, and the top of the wall has a planter built into it in the shape of a trench. This wall-top trench is about

6 inches wide
8 inches deep
7 feet long

It gets sun during the middle of the day, but is surrounded by high walls and tall trees, so only 3 hours or so per day of direct sunglight.

I would like to choose the right plant for this area. Flowers are not that important; I am more concerned that it looks nice all year around.

Optimally this would be a plant that does well even in winter and is hard to kill, as I am far from an expert in gardening.

Any advice would be greatly welcome.

Thanks!

 

you will want something tough as hell and to my mind not entirely dissimilar to Sedum acre (if that's a hint).

The only advice with regard to this little fellow is that it should be totally ignored. It does not benefit from gardeners helping it along. It is also not the fastest growing plant in the world, but has real charm if you bother to look at it through the seasons.

It may be underplanted with a variety of hardy small bulbs such as snowdrops, iris, mini-daffs, ipheion, etc to give a bit more of a show, and if so inclined some autumn flowering bulbs as well.

As a taller alternative that looks rubbish in the winter, great in the summer, and needs little more than zero attention try Agapanthus.

 

Agapanthus is certainly taller! Would that really work, Jazid? I'm thinking about drainage....
Agree totally about sedum acre, though, and the bulbs. Vinca would do well, I should think.
Have a look, Sacredlion
http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=vinca&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi

 

Saxifrage and sedum would give you something all year round - but how about mingling other things in like thrift and aubretia, rockery campanula - to give you splashes of colour. Even one of the smaller fuchsias, like Tom Thumb.

 

Galium likes regular moisture doesn't it, so guess it revolves around the drainage? Kind of thought it would have holes in the trough, otherwise it might have been referred to as a long thin squodgy bucket of gloop...Yup agree with WOL, London Pride would do the job. Also Harts Tongue ferns, the dreaded Butchers Broom, and probably with a minimum of TLC some of the Campanulas as well; porschkaryana etc.

 

Thanks everyone for your advice. I will check on the drainage situation -- there are some dead things in there left to rot by the previous owners of this lovely place we've just moved into, but presumably they were alive at one point, so I'm hoping that drainage was already sorted.

 

An update... I checked and the drainage looks to be decent; we've had a lot of rain in the past two days and the soil is wet but not waterlogged anywhere.

I've decided to go with the vinca minor; I found a cultivar that has flowers my wife really likes. This leaves two remaining questions that I would be interested in your views on...

1) Given that the vinca appears to be evergreen, is there any reason not to plant now?

2) After I remove the dead plants, is there anything in the way of fertilizer that I should mix into the soil?

Thanks again. I will post pictures after I've got the plants in place so you all can see...

 

Vinca is fine to plant now, assuming we don't have a major freeze!! - it's tough!

It's always good to put fresh compost in - general purpose, ideally peat-free for environmental reasons, which you can get from any GC or B+Q type place.

Enjoy! And I'm looking forward to the pictures... :rolleyes: :D

 

You could also consider Lavenders which are often happy in any conditions - they spread all over the place here. I also grow a dwarf Pieris in a similar situation but with more sunshine.

 

Vinca minor would be good, or sempervivums.

 

Two suggestions for flowers, which I realise are not your priorty. Wallflowers and Red Valerian (Centranthus rubra). They grow out of wall tops naturally, so obviously like those sort of conditions.