An attractive flower garden can add great beauty and structure to any yard or landscape feature, yet many find themselves struggling with the process of designing one.
Just a few simple tips can help you design a successful flower garden design. One method that may prove helpful is using a color wheel as a planting guide; shades of the same hue look good together while colors across from each other on the wheel, like purple and yellow, can work beautifully together.
Choose the Right Site
Location of a flower garden is of critical importance in order to maximize flower growth and ease of maintenance. Find an area that receives ample sun while avoiding shaded areas; additionally, ensure it can be seen from inside your house.
Consider whether or not your garden will be used for cuttings or display, and think about ways to incorporate focal points like arbors, pergolas, trellises and gates into its design. Hardscape elements also play a crucial role in flower garden layout; they complement your landscape while adding visual interest and complement it visually.
Utilizing accurate measurements and an approximate sketch are key in creating the ideal flower garden design layout. Doing this will enable you to plan the number of plants, colors and foliage types you plan on planting in your space.
Create a Mood Board
Create a mood board is an exercise in treating the garden as a canvas, using tools from other design disciplines and taking inspiration from them to envision what your landscape will look like from different viewpoints.
Use the aesthetic you’ve decided on as your guide as you gather photos, sketches, color swatches and other materials for the board. Visual references like this will enable you to see how all your ideas fit together within context of the space as a whole and shape any decisions made later.
Make sure to incorporate foliage variety and colors in your mood board as well. Foliage provides interest when flowers aren’t blooming and can serve as focal points or accents within your garden, adding textures, shapes, and other details that enhance its look.
Plan Your Plantings
If you want a full looking garden, choose flowers of different heights. Plant taller ones at the back while shorter plants create depth in your planting beds.
When selecting colors for your flower garden design, look at the color wheel for inspiration. Colors near each other on the wheel – for instance purple and red – often work well together, while foliage adds visual interest as well as contrast to your garden design.
Once you’ve selected your plants and have an idea of how your garden should look, it’s time to get planting! Make sure you set aside enough time for watering regularly as well as weeding to ensure optimal growth of flowers.
Prepare the Beds
Flower gardens provide you with an opportunity to express your artistic talent. The first step should be clearing away grass, weeds or debris before adding plenty of compost as soil enrichment.
Be mindful that plants come in different heights, and layering is crucial to creating a visually appealing flower bed. Taller plants should typically be located towards the back, while shorter varieties should occupying more front space.
Plant perennials with variable bloom times throughout the season and add annuals as fill-in color for additional dimension and texture in your flower beds. Flowers draw our gaze, but foliage brings texture and dimension. When planning flower beds, use odd numbers of plants in groupings (threes or fives) rather than even numbers for best results.
Plant the Flowers
Experienced flower garden designers understand the importance of creating gardens that offer year-round interest and staggered bloom times, from perennials with long blooming seasons like peonies, cleome, and zinnias through to shrubs with four-season interest like lilacs and roses.
When selecting show-stopping flowers, take into consideration their mature size as well as color and fragrance. Consider selecting some plants which provide nectar for butterflies and pollinators pollenation.
Unless your flower bed is an island type, place tall plants at the back and shorter ones in the center. Professionally designed gardens often utilize odd-numbered groupings of three, five, seven, or nine plants which create more dynamic displays than even numbers and look less cluttered than an assortment of flowers randomly planted across an unruly field.