Plants for purpose: Full sun

Easy to grow this tall herbaceous perennial variety produces tall stems full of pretty soft lilac-pink flowers running all the way to the top from June to August.

You won’t believe the sheer intensity of the blue of these flowering spiky leaf, architectural plants. Perfect for gravel or coastal style gardens, they’ll even grow well in very dry clay soils!  Flowering from July to August you can cut the stems for dried flower arrangements.

It’s good to have evergreen structure in a garden and a full sun border is no exception.  This pretty pink and white summer flowering variety has a height and spread of around 1.5m – 2.5m and small glossy dark green leaves.

If your soil is very dry and you want an undemanding long flowering plant covered in pretty small lilac colour flowers, this is a great choice. They look charming in a cottage or informal garden.

With fun white and pink flowers from early summer right the way through to autumn, the fragrance of the sweet-looking flowers will add some charming character to your borders or to add some magic to a cottage garden.

This evergreen is a small but vigorous evergreen shrub, with light blue flowers that can grow tall when grown against a wall, making them a perfect backing for a wall-side border that’s in full sun.

An easy grass to grow with your other flowering plants in the full sun border, with lovely bright white seed heads that look like rabbit tails; children of all ages find them fascinating.  You can keep the seed heads on the plant overwinter cutting them back in early spring just before the new growth appears.

Reliable, long flowering plants if given well drained soil and full sun.  They’ll reward you with beautiful deep, dark purple very upright flower stems between June and August and look good placed in the middle or even front of border.

The sun loving plant, lavender has an instantly recognisable scent. This variety grows up to 1 metre tall and wide with wonderfully scented cascades of flowers in high summer.  It will need very well-drained soil and pruning back after flowering to keep its shape and make sure you cut into the fresh green growth not the older, brown, woody stems as these often won’t regrow.

Bright sunshine yellow flowers with black cone-shape centres, loved by butterflies, cover this easy to grow herbaceous perennial from July all the way through to October. Brilliant in beds and borders, or even as cut flowers to bring some of the cheery joy inside.