Many flower garden designs rely on repetition of key colors or shapes. Repeated perennials like tulips or liatris ensures you will have plenty of blooms throughout your garden design.
Consider your USDA Growing Zone when selecting flowers for a flower garden, since plants that don’t suit your climate won’t thrive.
Choose plants with unique shapes (known as habits ) to add variety and interest to your garden.
Location
An effective flower garden requires more than simply planting the right blooms; it requires accurate measurements and careful layout that will reduce relocation needs after plants have taken root and allow you to achieve your ideal aesthetic.
Experts advise selecting a site with full sun or partial shade and monitoring its lighting conditions throughout the day, especially as sunlight travels across your yard. Tracking how it moves will allow you to select stunning flowers that thrive in your particular gardening environment.
Think year-round interest and staggered bloom times when planning your garden design, too. No one wants a garden that looks gorgeous in summer but is virtually lifeless by fall when perennials and annuals start wilting away. Additionally, experiment with shapes such as spires, buttons, rounded or linear forms, screens or screens for added contrast; and use fine-textured foliage along with more coarse leaves, or choose blooms with more refined blooms as ways of adding dimension and interest.
Sunlight
Many flowers require full or partial sunlight in order to thrive, so make sure the garden receives full or partial exposure. Full-sun plants will die when exposed to shaded conditions, while perennials in full-shade will bloom and then quickly die after blooming.
If you want your garden to remain colorful, try choosing perennial flowers with long bloom periods or annuals that rebloom each season. Additionally, repeat key colors or shapes to create a cohesive look; Wiley suggests repeating blue, purple and yellow/gold flowers for example to provide visual harmony and peace.
Don’t overlook plant shape and texture as a means to adding depth and interest to a garden. Spikey globe thistle leaves contrast beautifully with feathery astilbe leaves while the fringed edges and fuzzy petals of tulips and liatris provide subtle textures in any setting.
Soil
While it can be tempting to fill your garden with every bloom on the list, an effective landscape will contain both seasonal plants as well as those blooming year-round – perennial bloomers with various bloom times help ensure something colorful always stands out in color.
A great garden designer takes into account numerous attributes when designing a flower bed, including height, texture and form. Tallest plants should be placed toward the back while shorter varieties with groundcover should be at the forefront. In order to create a natural gradation of heights between plants with similar growing habits.
As an example, gardeners should aim to group together plants that form mounds and clumps together while planting some upright and spiky plants nearby – this helps avoid creating an unruly garden that’s difficult to manage and looks disorganized. Furthermore, they must ensure paths between flower beds are wide enough for wheelbarrows or garden carts to move through without issue.
Water
Flower garden plants require regular watering in order to flourish, so make sure that you provide enough and distribute it evenly across your garden space. A garden with too much shade or not enough water quickly becomes untidy and unruly.
Integrate an assortment of flower colors and shapes into the garden design for visual interest, as well as different plant heights, textures and foliage colors to keep it looking vibrant throughout the season. This will keep it looking its best!
Garden designer Piet Oudolf advises gardeners to think about shape when designing a garden, explaining that different perennial flower forms can work together to reinforce an overall design concept – for instance spires and plumes can be highlighted with daisies and buttons as an echoed design element.
Add plants that bloom throughout the year so something is always in bloom, including those with distinct foliage textures that complement or contrast with each other, like sword-like gladioli and delicate bleeding heart leaves, for instance.