We have a small, East facing front garden and are looking for tall plants to grow up behind the front wall, and a climber that will cling to a trellis on the porch. Ideally the trellis would need to be removed for repainting every 5 years or so, so nothing that sticks too much to the walls of the house. Can anyone recommend anything that has worked well for them and is relatively easy to maintain?
Not sure what you mean by tall but I have an Oleander which is around 6 feet tall that I’ve not watered or fed in years and it just gets on with it, and you get some nice flowers for a few weeks of the year. All I do now is prune it back each year as it’s big enough now. I believe the leaves are toxic though.
For climbers I guess any clematis, honeysuckle etc - I’ve found the clematis tend to grow faster (though there are lots of varieties) but I prefer the scent of the honeysuckle- some of the jasmines are nice also.
Good luck!
We have a jasmine in a similar location, wallflowers are doing very well, mallow, hydrangeas, foxgloves have all done fine- wisteria was a bit disappointing and never flowered though.
How tall is the wall? And what period or style is the house? I’m rather partial to standard roses in a front garden or lining a path. We have them as the framework dotted along the side of our drive. But I don’t think they work in a house of say the 1960s onwards.
In my opinion, honeysuckle can get a bit tangled over a porch in settings and styles other than a country cottage type garden. A clematis has the advantage of (usually) being pruned hard each year. As long as you remember they like “feet in the shade, head in the sun”.
Wisteria can sometimes take a long time to flower. You also want to make sure you don’t plant a climber that can damage your house’s pointing, so choose something that twines around itself and the trellis, rather than clings to the wall.
For a quick fix this summer I don’t think you could beat annual sweet peas. They have the advantage that the more you cut the flowers, the more you get. And then you can use this year to see what does well in your neighbourhood and see what you really like.
You could maybe even plant a few runner beans amongst them for a weird but edible display and the sweet peas would help with pollination. I’m trying that in a massive pot in my back garden as a lockdown experiment this year.
Scent is high on my list of priorities for near a door or window and I intended to plant (agry)citisus battandeiri (can’t spell it!) pineapple scented broom. But I couldn’t get an affordable one online during lock down. NB That’s a shrub, not a climber.
Thank you all for your replies so far. The wall is not high, around 50cm or so. The house is 1910 in a Victorian style, with a very small gravelled front.
Thanks for the extra info Helen. In my opinion, standard roses (or other standards for that matter), by which I mean those lollipop looking plants, where the rose (or lilac or whatever) is grafted onto the top of a different, straight rootstock, can make a small garden look bigger. You can underplant in so many styles, but you have a structure that raises the garden up above the wall and you can see from inside the house too.
The standard roses in my front garden are called Little White Pet - and I now realize I have no photos of them in bloom! Something I must do this year!!
But here are some examples of standards planted in Edwardian-ish front gardens.
