Flowers gardens can add color and beauty to your landscape. From foundation gardens to walkways adorned with colourful blooms, here are some tips that will help you design and construct your flower garden design with ease.
Tip #1: Learn to Know Your Plants. Familiarize yourself with each plant’s mature height and width before considering its color options.
Choose Your Site
Flower garden design starts with identifying where a garden belongs in its surroundings. An unattractive border thrown haphazardly onto a lawn or placed at random corners is both unsightly and distracting, creating an unpleasant aesthetic experience for visitors to your space.
Once you’ve selected a location, measure it carefully to establish the size of your garden border and dimensions. This will enable you to use these measurements to generate your layout sheet accurately while also ensuring your plants fit comfortably within their new homes.
Arrange your plantings according to height and structure. Taller plants should go in the back and center, while lower-lying varieties should be placed closer to the front or edges of the bed. A striking combination would be planting three or five pink tall garden phlox together; adding additional plant types will prevent an unruly look in your bed.
Choose plants with staggered bloom times to provide year-round interest. When one flower fades or dies off, another should already be in full bloom and ready to fill its place.
Think About the Light
Flowers thrive when exposed to ample sunlight and growing conditions that are well-drained; beyond this, garden design should reflect your personal taste and preferences. You could opt for straight-edged beds with carefully spaced plants, or something more natural such as curving lines and irregular clusters of blooms.
Review Plant Height
Plants come in all different heights, which you can use to your advantage by carefully layering plantings and keeping sight lines open so you can still see flowers at the back of the bed. Grouping three (or any odd number of each type of plant) together in groups provides visual cohesion and stability in design.
Plant native perennials to create an inviting space for bees, butterflies and hummingbirds in your garden; these flowers produce the most nectar and host caterpillars effectively. You might also add evergreen shrubs for winter interest as this will give depth and dimension to your landscape design.
Decide on a Focal Point
Focal points in flower gardens are objects or structures that draw your eye and capture it, such as plant species, garden structures like trellises or arches, decorative items like mirrors or birdbaths. Focal points work best when their style complements that of the overall landscape as well as those surrounding flowers and plants.
Review Plant Height
When creating a flower garden as part of your front yard, for instance, placing tallest plants towards the back may help ensure they won’t block windows or walkways when at their height. On the other hand, creating an island garden in the center might require you to place tallest ones there instead.
Ideal bloom times should be spread throughout the growing season so that when some flowers begin to wither and fade, new bursts of color have already emerged elsewhere in your garden.
Create a Backdrop
Flower garden design involves more than soil preparation and plant selection; you have complete creative freedom when it comes to its layout. While some gardeners might prefer more formal arrangements with straight lines and evenly planted rows, others might favor more natural-looking designs with curving paths and irregular clusters of plants.
Repetition is the cornerstone of an efficient garden, providing continuity and visual balance. Select flowers that have long blooming seasons that fit within your growing conditions as targets for repetition.
Before diving too deeply into your garden design project, take care to ruthlessly weed out anything that isn’t doing well or doesn’t excite you – this will make the rest more pleasing and visually stimulating! Consider adding flowers with different bloom times so when one starts to fade another will already have set down roots to take its place.