Every garden has a wet corner, and for years I fought ours instead of planting it. An article on Living Water Gardens about plants for damp ground made me stop fighting. Now that corner is the busiest part of the garden, and I do almost nothing to it.
You find the soggy spots after heavy rain. Boots on, walk the garden, look for the places where water stands for a day or two, the patch of moss, the low corner where the downpipe empties. Ours is behind the shed, shaded and slow to drain. For years it was mud and a few broken paving slabs.
Yellow flag iris went in first. It takes standing water without complaint, it grows tall enough to give the corner some shape, and the flowers are worth waiting for. I put in a few clumps, which felt bold at the time. By the second summer it had joined them all up.
Ferns came next. Lady fern along the drier edge, royal fern further in where the ground stays damp all year. They unfurl slowly in spring, which is half the pleasure, and they hold their shape until the first hard frost.
For grasses I went with sedges, which look like grass and behave better in wet soil. A golden sedge gives the corner a lift of colour, and the pendulous sedge self seeds about, so be ready for that. Mine has wandered further than I planned. I have decided to call it a design choice.
The trick with all of them is to let them spread. No tidying in autumn, no cutting back until late winter, and no rushing to divide. Give a wet corner a couple of seasons and it fills itself. After that you can lift a clump for a neighbour, which is how most of my plants arrived in the first place.
