Planning your May garden — and a quick way to find what fits

Late April has that particular feeling. The garden's looking livelier by the week, the cold frame is groaning, and the seed trays on the kitchen windowsill have started to mutiny. Most of us are itching to get tender plants out — and the next ten days are when we need to slow down for a moment and plan, before the May rush takes over.

The frost calculation

The single most useful thing you can do this week is work out your last expected frost date. For most of southern England that's mid-May; for the Midlands and the North, late May is the safer bet; in Scotland and the higher inland spots, plenty of gardeners wait until the first week of June.

This decides almost everything else. Tomatoes, courgettes, runner beans, dahlias not yet planted out, basil, French beans, cosmos, salvias — none of these go outside permanently until the frost risk has passed. They can spend the next fortnight hardening off in a sheltered spot during the day and coming back in (or under fleece) overnight, which gets them tougher without losing growth.

Plants that don't mind a cold night and can go out now: hardy perennials in pots, bare-root and pot-grown shrubs, alliums and most bulb foliage already up, sweet peas (now climbing), brassicas, peas, broad beans, lettuce, spinach, chard, beetroot.

What to be ordering this week

For first-of-May planting:

• Bedding — pelargoniums, petunias, busy lizzies, lobelia, bidens. Garden centres start selling these in earnest from late April but supply is best in the first week of May.
• Summer-flowering perennials — geraniums (the cranesbill kind), salvias, lupins, peonies still in tight bud, achilleas. These go in now and will give you years.
• Container annuals — anything with "patio" or "basket" in the name; even half a dozen plants per basket is enough if you choose vigorous varieties.
• Climbers and roses — last call for bare-root; pot-grown is the only sensible option from now until autumn.

For mid- to late-May:

• Tender vegetables — tomato plants, courgette plants, sweet corn, French beans, runner beans, cucumbers.
• Dahlias — if you haven't started tubers indoors, you can plant them straight into the ground from mid-May. They'll catch up.
• Bedding for hot spots — gazanias, osteospermums, verbenas. These hate being cold and wet.

The bit everyone finds hardest

There's a stage between "I want some plants" and "I know what to buy" that almost no one enjoys. You walk around the garden, you look at a bare patch, you mentally inventory what's in shade vs sun, what's wet vs dry, what's clay vs free-draining — and then you stand in the garden centre or scroll through a website and immediately forget all of it.

We built the Garden Designer specifically for that moment.

How the Garden Designer works

It works in three short steps and lives at compareplants.uk/garden-planner.

You start by telling it about a single zone in your garden — a border, a bed, a corner, a tricky spot under a tree. You answer four quick questions: how much sun it gets (full sun, partial shade, or full shade), what the soil's like (free-draining, average, or heavy/wet), how exposed it is to wind, and whether it's a wet patch or a dry one. That's it for inputs.

The planner then runs through every plant in our index that matches those conditions, scores them on how well they fit, and presents the ones that work best — with prices from each of our listed nurseries that stocks them shown alongside. So you don't get a generic "you could plant a hellebore" recommendation; you get a list of specific cultivars, sized for your spot, with the prices side by side and a direct link to each nursery's buy page.

There's nothing to sign up for and no account to create. You answer four questions, you get an answer, and you can run it again for the next zone in your garden whenever you like.

It's not a substitute for walking your garden with a friend who knows plants. Nothing is. But it does the heavy lifting of "what works in this exact spot, and what it'll cost from various nurseries" so you can spend more time on the bit that actually matters — choosing what you love.

A worked example

Try this if you've got a north-facing border with damp soil under a couple of trees. The Garden Designer will turn up hellebores, ferns, hardy geraniums, brunneras, hostas, pulmonarias and astrantias — all things that thrive in cool damp shade — with each entry showing the prices from each nursery that stocks it and a direct link to their buy page. You can usually plant up a 3-metre stretch for a sensible budget if you're patient about pot sizes, and have it looking properly furnished by next spring.

A second example, the polar opposite: south-facing, free-draining, full sun. The same planner returns lavenders, perovskia, salvias, achilleas, sedums, eryngiums and grasses. Hot, dry, low-maintenance, bee-magnet. Different plants, same workflow.

One thing to be aware of

The Garden Designer is most useful for the kind of plant decisions where conditions matter most — perennials, shrubs, climbers, ground cover. For pure colour-and-out bedding, or tomato selection, or "I just want a peony", it's overkill; just go to the relevant category page.

But for that question of "what should I actually plant in this awkward spot?" — which is the question most of us are quietly avoiding right now — it's the tool we wished we'd had ten years ago.

Looking ahead

May proper is just over a week away, and once it arrives the garden moves fast. The next newsletter, going out on the 1st, focuses on the full month's planting calendar, plant of the month, and a few tips for staying ahead of the slug season that we all know is coming.

In the meantime — go and check your frost date.