Tropical plant combinations

oreilly.cian.1 · January 2017

Hi Folks,

I have a north facing slim garden area at the back of my house, which I plan to turn into a tropical style garden. The area is 8metres (24 ft) x 2.8metres (9ft). When I say style, I want to be able to include native plants.

I have started a collection of tropical looking plants, bamboo, banana plant, melianthus major, dicksonia antarctica, and some ferns.These are small and require time to grow obvisouly

For such a small space, It feels that if I have too many species, it will look very busy and no cohesion. Looking online at other examples however, It seems gardens have a big wall of green which creates the lush look that I'm after. I'v never been very good at deciding on combinations and need some help here. Attached is a sketch of a layout. I just threw down ideas but need to work on combinations.

For natives, I would hope hellebores, ferns, grasses will work, and add some box hedging to shake things up a bit!

Any help or tips on how I go about this would be great. The garden is surrounded by 6 ft high walls. I would like some area for bbq and small seating area