Plants designers overuse, and what to plant instead

Every plant on this list is popular for a good reason. They are easy to buy and they look good in photographs. The trouble is that they get specified by reflex, sometimes on sites that suit them badly, and a garden planted with the same handful of plants as the house next door does nothing for the client or for the designer's portfolio. Here are seven familiar plants, the catch with each, and something to consider instead.

Box balls

Clipped box has given gardens structure for centuries. In much of the UK it now has two serious problems: box blight, a fungal disease that strips the leaves, and the box tree caterpillar, which can defoliate a plant in a few weeks of summer. Both can be managed, but managing them is a commitment few clients understand when they ask for "a few box balls".

Instead: yew (Taxus baccata) clips just as tightly, copes with sun and shade, and lives for centuries. It is slow for the first couple of years and then faster than its reputation. Where the soil is acid, Ilex crenata is another close match. All parts of yew except the red flesh around the seed are poisonous, which is worth mentioning in a garden with small children or animals.

Mexican feather grass

Stipa tenuissima (now often sold as Nassella tenuissima) looks wonderful moving in the wind and costs very little. It is also short-lived and seeds itself everywhere, especially into gravel. Charming in year one, it can be a weeding job by year three. In parts of Australia it is treated as a serious invasive weed, which tells you how readily it spreads.

Instead: Sesleria autumnalis gives a similar soft, pale texture in a tidier and longer-lived clump. Sporobolus heterolepis takes longer to settle but has fine foliage, airy late flowers with a scent people compare to popcorn or coriander, and good autumn colour.

Verbena bonariensis

It flowers for months and you can see straight through it to the plants behind. It is also in so many schemes that it has become shorthand for "contemporary planting", and it seeds into every gap. In colder gardens it often doesn't survive the winter, so you rely on those seedlings anyway.

Instead: for see-through height, try Sanguisorba, such as 'Red Thunder', whose dark burgundy bobbles hover over other plants well into autumn. In moister soil and part shade, Thalictrum delavayi gives a similar airy veil in lilac.

Heuchera

The leaf colours are tempting on a nursery bench. In the garden, many heucheras turn woody and open within a few years and need lifting and replanting. Vine weevil larvae love their roots, especially in pots.

covers the ground in sun or shade, has aromatic leaves and colours well in autumn. In shade, has fine foliage, delicate early flowers and copes with dry shade once established. If the brief really needs dark leaves, 'Black Scallop' is lower and tougher.