Planting against a south wall is easy: it’s warm, there’s plenty of bright light, you can have all the colour you want and the choice of plants is huge.
Cold north walls are another matter. You’ll never make such an extravagant display there and the choice of plants is smaller, but still there’s no reason why a north facing wall should look second class, only quieter, greener, and actually – if your south wall is very busy – a bit of a relief and a contrast to that display. Colourful plants for north walls do exist of course -- shrubs and climbers -- they just don’t shout quite so loud as the sun-lovers.
If you want the best from a north wall, you mustn’t be mean with your planting. Yes, you can get climbers into a strip 30cms deep and they’ll do well, but it’s far better and will do so much more for the look of a north-facing house wall if you make a bed 90cms deep. Then you’ll be able to step back and feel the house is part of the garden.
In a bed of that depth you can grow many kinds of plants. You might use some of the climbers I’ve mentioned below, but you also need flowering shrubs that will spill forward, perhaps over the path if there is one, plants that will make the wall look as lush. If you want to achieve a really lush-looking planting, you ought to put in some ferns; big, ordinary native ferns like the male and broad buckler -- not fancy little coloured ones, but green ferns that will arch out and soften the whole picture. All you need then is a few snowdrops, a few cyclamen and some Solomon’s seal, and you have a generous border.
Stephen’s top ten
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Climbers
Honeysuckle
Lonicera
Dry over-sunny positions lead to disease in honeysuckles, but too much shade reduces flowering. Some kinds, however, are at their best in shade. Lonicera tragophylla has huge yellow flowers and is excellent set into a tree (June-July, 5m). You could also try the hybrid ‘Dropmore Scarlet’ (July-October, 4m).
Virginia creeper
Parthenocissus henryana
Virginia creeper can be 50ft high and fabulously dark red in autumn. This species, however, can grow to about 4m and is easily pulled back in winter if it overextends itself. It’s self-clinging, like the bigger species, but its summer leaves are far more interesting. They’re a deep, bluish green, with pinky-purple veins — and with fabulous autumn colour.
Shrubs
Camellia
C. japonica
Camellias need no introduction and this species and its varieties are the best ones for a north wall. It needs to be a sheltered wall, however, and the soil should be on the acid side, open textured and ideally peaty — but sandy can be OK if it’s kept moist in high summer.
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Fuchsia
F. ‘Riccartonii’
When you see so many tender fuchsias used as bedding plants in sun, it’s easy to forget that the hardy wild ones are happy in shade as 2m shrubs (if you prefer something smaller, prune them right down every March), and they flower all summer until the frosts. This variety is amazingly hardy and will even make a hedge out in the open if the garden is not too cold. The flowers are thin red and purple pendants, not the fat bobbles of the tender hybrids.
Flowering quince
Chaenomeles japonica
There is real pleasure in training a flowering quince tight to a wall. It need stand no deeper than 20cm in winter, so you can easily plant it beside a path, perhaps under a window. The common form has orange flowers that open before the leaves, but you will also find white and red. Little yellow edible “quinces” follow.
Daphne
D. odora ‘Aureomarginata’
This sprawly 90cm daphne has pretty, variegated leaves, but the real stunner is the perfume of its late winter purplish flowers. The scent will fill the air near by.
Forsythia
Forsythia suspensa
Forget that stiff, outrageously bright yellow shrub that you see everywhere in April. This one is up to 3m, lemon yellow, and the growth is thinner and airier, just the job for growing against a wall where, after annual pruning when the flowers are done, the new shoots will arch out from the wall.
Viburnum
V. x burkwoodii
This evergreen viburnum flowers right through the spring, white, with a scent rather like a daphne. It makes a rounded shrub of perhaps 1.5-2m. The leaves are shiny green above and brown-felted below.
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Cotoneaster
C. horizontalis
Where won’t this cotoneaster grow? It has stems that lean against the wall in sweeping arches, 1.5m but taller if you let it. The berries are red and the autumn colour in the tiny leaves is even redder. Bees go crazy for it, even when the little white flowers are barely open.
Silk tassel bush
Garrya ‘James Roof’
The long catkins of this sturdy 3m evergreen may only be green but they perform in January-February — which counts for a lot — and they love a north wall. ‘James Roof’, with its 35cm catkins, is the most popular.