Key plants in the Exodus Adventure Travels: The Sounds of Adventure Garden

A spreading deciduous shrub with handsome, large, deeply lobed leaves turning red and purple in autumn. Flowers cream, in conical panicles with numerous large sterile florets.

Benefits:

• Thrives in challenging conditions
• Resilient to neglect and heatwaves
• Beautiful white flowers in summer and rich red foliage in autumn
• Rabbit and deer resistant

A tall, bushy annual to 2.5m, with very finely divided, mid-green leaves, and large flowers to 8cm across, usually white or pink the wide outer rays surround a central disc of tightly clustered, usually yellow, inner disc florets. 

Benefits:

• Reliable performer in any weather
• Bushes out and produces more flowers with dead-heading
• Available in various colours
• Self-seeds but not considered too aggressive in most regions

The tough plants are easy to grow and low maintenance, use them in borders with other perennials or as an informal edging as an alternative to lavender.

Benefits:

• Indestructible and low maintenance
• Spikes of blue, white or pink flowers from June to September
• Easy to propagate and establish in the garden

Robust, upright herbaceous perennial, with jaggedy-divided, prickly dark green leaves whitish beneath. Rounded, violet-blue flower heads on silvery, branched, leafy stems, from early in midsummer. 

Benefits:

• Non-invasive
• Adored by pollinators
• Tolerates a variety of growing conditions, including full sun and partial shade
• Adds a remarkable presence to the garden with its towering stature

These classic and instantly recognisable plant, ideal for almost every style of garden. 

Benefits:

• Wide variety of resilient varieties available for different conditions
• Continuously blooms from mid-summer to late autumn with regular dead-heading
• Tolerates full sun and partial shade on various soil types
• Some varieties, like ‘Bonica’ and ‘Eustacia Vye’, are particularly resilient to wet and windy conditions