Best Plants for Creating a Victorian Themed Garden

Recreating a Victorian style garden is only as good as the plants that you include in it, because even if you have the style and design done correctly, the plants used most commonly during this period are most important. As with all gardens, there are several different types of plants that can be used in a Victorian themed garden in order to bring every element together and take your yard from nice landscaping into an entirely transformed show garden.

The following are the best plants for creating a Victorian themed garden and include everything from the best potted varieties to what you can entice to grow over Victorian themed garden accessories.

Best Spring Plants
You want to start of the growing season right in your garden, so make sure you include plenty of early springtime plants that will begin blooming as soon as the temperature begins to rise and fill the garden with green and a little color. Sweet peas are a beautiful vine with plenty of color and they still come in a lot of different varieties that were popular in Victorian gardens, especially Painted Lady, Blanche Ferry and Butterfly sweet pea. For a plant that is a little more substantial, try the perennial, Rodgersia, which is a unique leafy variety that will add color and height to your garden. Even better, by the time summer comes around, Rodgersia will grace your garden with large white blooms.

Plants for Scent
A huge part of the Victorian garden were those plants that were added and grown for their scent. Herbs, such as English lavender, dill and oregano, were especially popular, but flowering and ornamental plants were used as well. Common Heliotrope was adored for its scent just as much as it was for the blue flowers that topped two foot high stalks. The vanilla scent the heliotrope lets off is an added bonus. An especially common and well used plant added for its scent, is sage, which comes in several varieties and there were many available in Victorian gardens that are still being grown today. Tricolor sage, pineapple sage and purple sage all do well in borders or in containers that can be tucked into any corner of a garden.

Commonly Used Annuals
While perennials have really caught on as some of the favorite plants to include in the modern garden, very few were found in traditional Victorian gardens, making annuals the king of the flower beds. Some of the most popular annuals from that time period that you could include in your own themed garden are zinnias, signet marigolds, salvia, Isla Gold Tansy and Chinese primroses. In some cases, a couple annuals can be brought indoors and wintered to include in your garden next year, but for the best color it is best to start each of these annuals.

Garden Beauties
Flowering garden beauties are always the favorite in any garden, because they are the first thing you notice and the one thing most observers are looking for. Victorian gardens grew flowers for their large, exotic looking blooms, so anything showy goes. Some of the most common and favorites include Flowering Tobacco, which can grow to three feet tall and displays floral trumpets in pink, red and white. Penstemon is another popular variety that is still commonly used today, it also has a stacked bell trumpet flower and will keep hummingbirds, bees and butterflies around through the summer months. Catchfly gives any garden a nice full look, and in Victorian gardens it was used for its bushy form and three season color that really pops.

Then there are the serious garden beauties like Zebra Mallow and certain rose varieties that do require a little more patience and attention when added. Double knock out roses, and pink flower carpet rose are two varieties that were often used and seen in many replicated gardens from that time period. English Daisy and ornamental kale were commonly included in the landscape to fill gaps that required either height or low growing, vertical growth.

All of these plants, used correctly, and combined with traditional Victorian ornamentation and design really bring a themed garden together that you can be proud of.