How to make a coastal garden
Coastal gardening can be a challenge, but with the right plants in the right place, your garden and its wildlife visitors can thrive.
Water vole by Terry Whittaker/2020VISION
Coastal gardening can be a challenge, but with the right plants in the right place, your garden and its wildlife visitors can thrive.
As its name suggests, Sea spurge is found at the coast. It is an attractive plant that displays cup-shaped, greeny-yellow flowers and fleshy, grey-green leaves.
A scrambling plant, Meadow vetchling has yellow flowers. It is a member of the pea family and can be seen on rough grassland, waste ground and roadside verges.
A delicate, small plant of woodlands and hedgerows, wood-sorrel has distinctive, trefoil leaves and white flowers with purple veins; both fold up at night.
Selfheal is a low-growing, creeping plant that likes the short turf of grasslands, roadside verges or even lawns. Its clusters of violet flowers appear in summer.
Water-plantain is an aquatic plant of shallow water and muddy banks. In bloom over summer, it displays tall branches of loosely clustered, pale lilac flowers.
A small and delicate plant of chalk grasslands, Fairy flax can be seen in bloom from May to September - look out for its nodding, white flowers.