When designing flower gardens, two essential factors are soil preparation and matching plants with the growing site. From there on out, aesthetic choices are entirely up to you.
Flowers come in all sorts of shapes and forms. Some bloom into cushions, mounds or clumps while others have more upright growth structures that you can take advantage of when planning your bed design.
Design Considerations
Think carefully about the style and statement you wish to make with your flower garden, its location and lighting conditions as well as how well it integrates with other features of your landscape.
Plan your garden to provide year-round visual interest by including plants with differing colors, sizes and textures. Don’t forget shrubs – they add structure while giving the illusion of fuller blooms when flowers don’t appear!
Steep slopes present unique challenges and may require terracing in order to prevent soil erosion and provide sufficient planting space. Some sites on these steep hillsides could even make excellent settings for rock gardens with tough mat-forming groundcovers like sedums.
World-renowned Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf advises starting with the shape of your flower blooms as a point of departure when designing gardens. Spires, pompoms, buttons, globes and umbels all pair well; try mixing shapes to add visual interest.
Plant Selection
Flower garden designs must take into account soil and environmental conditions on a property when selecting plants that work well together, from its soil type and environment, down to the perennials they contain. A flower bed planted with perennials that require full sun with sandy, well-drained soil may not prove as successful compared to one filled with perennials that tolerate partial shade with clay-based soil.
Experts advise flower garden designers to also take plant sizes and heights into consideration when making selections for their flower garden designs. Understanding how tall a perennial will become over time ensures it complements surrounding landscaping features like trees, shrubs, and grasses aesthetically.
Gardening experts often incorporate flowers with different bloom times into their gardens so as to maintain color throughout the season, even as some blooms wilt or fade, others are ready to step in as replacements – this method especially proves beneficial with perennials which don’t all bloom at the same time and provides another means of prolonging a flower garden’s beauty.
Lighting
Flower gardens allow hobbyists to express their creativity and individual tastes, as well as learn about plant species, growth needs and design elements. Finding an appropriate location within their yard for creating successful flowerbeds is the key to creating successful gardens.
To maximize your garden experience, select plants with different bloom times. This will allow the flowers to last longer while adding new hues as their old blooms fade.
Lighting can make an enormous difference to the beauty of a flower bed. Lighting should accentuate the colors of flowers and other features in your garden; yellow LEDs add warmth and energy, while blue ones bring calm. Also be sure to place lighting near key sculptural features like trellises, bird baths or even statues such as frogs for optimal effect.
Watering
If you already have a garden, take an in-depth look at your flower beds and make any necessary changes. Now is an opportune moment to be brutal about getting rid of plants that don’t look full (such as garden phlox that requires five or seven plants to look full) or that are no longer pleasing (like Echinacea that was planted too close together).
Add blooms that bloom at different times throughout the season for a continuous display of color throughout. When one group fades away, another can step in its place.
Keep your garden looking its best by providing each plant with one-inch of water each week, according to McConnell. This amount should keep soil moist without becoming waterlogged or muddy. For even easier watering needs, installing drip lines could save both time and effort while making sure flowers receive what they require.