Our Favourite Plants for a Farmhouse Garden

I don’t profess to be a gardener. In fact, I’d go as far as to say I dislike gardening unless it involves supervising where to plant and sitting under a shady tree with a glass of wine on a summer’s afternoon. I do have many favourite plants, however, and creating a pretty farmhouse garden was one of the goals Mr GGF and I had on our list in 2019. In this post, you’ll discover the plants we love and why we chose them for our farmhouse garden.

Criteria for Choosing Plants

When creating our farmhouse garden we had a few criteria. Our plans were dictated by the heritage trees already surrounding the garden area and, then, by the look we wanted to achieve. For us, the garden was to resemble an English style with hedges to create formality. Behind the hedges, informal beds of perennials would create the vintage farmhouse vibe.

To create our farmhouse garden our first criteria was that the plants must be hardy and cope well without regular watering. I’m not one to spend hours in the garden while Mr GGF is away at work, so if the plant requires too much maintenance it most likely won’t make the cut. Second, the plants in our garden are chosen by colour, namely blue and white. The farmhouse garden is filled with all the blue and purplish-blue tones we could find. We use seasonal pops of yellow in bulbs, deciduous trees in Autumn and the odd pink hydrangea. We love a blue and white garden. In fact, when I look back, almost every garden we’ve created has used these colours.

Our Favourite Plants

DAISIES

I adore daisies of any kind, as long as they are white. I’m not a fan of the coloured varieties. To me, the daisy screams relaxed country charm. I love the structure of the flowers and the bright yellow centres. I also like the fact you can cut them, put them in vases and get a show of flowers for months. Daisies come in ground covers and small to medium shrubs. They’re hardy and will grow just about anywhere with minimal water, another reason why they are a favourite.

LAVENDER

It’s no secret that lavender would be high on my list of favourites. It meets all the criteria above and like daisies, looks lovely as a cut flower. One of my favourite things to do last Spring was to buy a couple of pots of lavender and have them as indoor plants for a month or so before transferring them to the garden. We love lavender because it smells beautiful, makes a long lasting display and can be trimmed easily.

SALVIA

There are over 500 species of Salvia in Australia and they come in a number of colours but we love the blue variety. (Of course). Why do we love salvias? They grow fast. They flower for long periods producing long spiky-type flowers. Salvias are a member of the mint family, so they have pretty leaves and have a bushy habit. They make a pretty backdrop for lower growing annuals in our garden and like the shady areas under our big trees.

NATIVE FERNS

Part of our garden, on the south side, is in shade all day. When we bought the farm the area had the remnants of a fern garden. We moved the tree fern in preparation for restoring the verandah but the rest of the ferns stayed in place. Over the course of a couple of months, they were trampled on by tradesmen and a verandah built over the top of them. Since then, the ferns have regenerated and spread, filling the space under the verandah. We rarely water them, yet they love the dark space. They are perfect for all year green and adding a softness to the verandah.

HEDGES

Hedges complete a garden for us. They create formality and contain the random plantings behind them. Our choice of hedging is a mixture of traditional and native. We’ve planted box hedges around the garden beds. The boundaries are a mix of Tea tree, Pittosporum and Leighton Green conifers. The latter two will grow quickly while the English Box hedging, though taking longer to reach maturity, gives us the country charm we are after.

If you’d like to see how the garden looks now, check out my latest YouTube post.

If you’d like to know more about cool climate planting in Australia, the Gardening Australia website has a useful list of plants and vegetables suitable for our climate and all over Australia.

Also check out my Pinterest board on Australian Country homes and gardens