No matter if you’re planting an entire flower garden or just a few beds, following some basic principles will ensure you create a visually striking space.
Color plays an integral part in gardening. Gardeners find that flowers in shades of the same hue, or diagonal from each other on the color wheel, look best together.
Consider Your Soil and Light
Flower garden layout ideas involve many variables. Soil conditions, water availability and light all play an integral role in how a garden develops and appears. While personal preferences will ultimately dictate your choice of design style for your bed, here are a few general rules you should heed:
Piet Oudolf, an esteemed Dutch garden designer, suggests that beginner gardeners begin by focusing on shape and exploring how various flowers complement one another. His advice? : “Start with the spires and plumes then work from there.”
Knowing your USDA growing zone will also be useful, to make sure that any flowers chosen will thrive in your region and produce maximum beauty in your garden. Without this knowledge, selecting plants which cannot grow there would only result in their death and less beauty from your garden overall.
Determine the Shape of Your Bed
Once you’ve completed your research and selected an ideal location for your flower garden, think carefully about its overall aesthetic. Do you prefer formal, straight edges with uniform planting patterns, or would sweeping curves and irregular clusters of blooms give more of a natural aesthetic?
Wiley advises creating a sense of unity through repetition of key colors, shapes and plant species – however this does not restrict your choices when it comes to color palette or adding show-stopping focal points in your flower garden.
As part of your garden layout plan, it is also crucial that you consider the mature height of each plant when selecting and placing your selections. This will enable you to stagger the plantings so the tallest plants do not obscure windows or doors or become too large for their space in the garden. Taller plants should typically go towards the back while shorter varieties should be planted in front – with alliums, salvias, coral bells/heucheras/veronicas/columbines being exceptions).
Think About Plant Height
No matter if you start from seed or purchase already grown plants, keep in mind that the matured size of each plant won’t reach its maximum until it reaches full maturity. Therefore it is crucial that when designing flower beds you consider their final height so as not to crowd out or block windows and doors during their growth process.
Professionally designed flower gardens often incorporate repetition of colors and forms to achieve harmony and balance in their design. Odd numbers such as three or five are typically more pleasing to the eye than even numbers.
Keep your flower garden exciting by experimenting with colors and foliage. Try playing around with combinations of fine and coarse foliage, round and spear-shaped leaves, as well as other variations in shape to add interest and keep the garden interesting after blooms have faded. Lurie Garden employs Epimedium x versicolor ‘Sulphureum’ (bishop’s hat; foreground) and Sesleria autumnalis (moor grass; background) as part of a monochromatic base plant layer to achieve this unique effect.
Think About Paths
Flower gardens don’t exist in isolation: they must complement your landscape as a whole. A garden that looks out of place plopped haphazardly somewhere looks unsettling and disjointed.
Plan paths to connect your garden to other parts of the landscape or at least link its flower beds together. A straight formal path can serve to direct traffic away from delicate plantings while an informal winding pathway allows your eyes to travel along wild pollinator gardens revealing more color.
When selecting plant combinations for your flower garden, keep the future appearance in mind when making decisions. Flowers planted with shades of the same hue (for instance pink) look particularly striking together. Color combinations across from one another on the color wheel such as purple and yellow also work well – plus don’t forget that foliage can add lots of interest even after blooms have wilted!