Experienced flower garden designers create gardens with year-round interest and staggered bloom times, taking into account mature height and structure so your plants receive adequate sunlight in your garden bed.
Flower beds with the greatest visual impact often use this technique of layering taller plants at the back and shorter ones in front, creating an elegant gradation of heights to give the impression of less chaos and more cohesion.
Determine the Layout
When planning your flower garden, keep several key concepts in mind. First, establish clearly defined borders around each of the beds using garden edging or stones so as to prevent grass and weeds from invading their space – this gives the flower gardens structure.
Repetition is another effective design trick. Placing plants of similar colors or flowers across multiple beds creates harmony in your garden, as does pairing colors that sit adjacent to one another on the color wheel, like purple and yellow, to achieve visual interest and visual harmony.
Mix up the heights and depth of plants in your flower beds to add interest and depth, ensuring your garden will remain attractive all year long, even after blooms have faded away. Don’t forget to include seasonal bloomers so your garden remains attractive to pollinators!
Determine the Plants
Just as location is key to real estate investment, repetition in flower garden design is equally as essential. Repetition of core colors, shapes and plant species provides an essential sense of unity to an otherwise chaotic garden design, according to Wiley. “The aim is to produce an organized look,” according to him; using edging and hardscape features as decorative accents also works wonders in creating harmony among color and texture elements in a design.
Cowan advises beginning by assessing soil conditions and sunlight exposure of your site, then choosing flowers which thrive in that specific geographic region and soil type.
As it’s essential that each element in the flower garden be given adequate space, so as not to become overrun by overgrowth. Once this has been determined, then planning the specific plants and their locations based on mature size. When possible include odd number groupings of similar type plants as this makes for more pleasing sightlines than even groupsings.
Determine the Sunlight
Be mindful when designing a flower garden of its lighting needs. Different plants require different levels of sun exposure in order to thrive; some require full sun (6 hours or more of direct sunlight per day), while others thrive under part-sun conditions.
To measure your planting area’s sunlight, conduct four observations throughout the day – morning, noon, 3pm and 6pm). Each time, make note of which areas receive direct and indirect sun, as well as how that changes with each season and season change. Keep track of these details with an up-to-date map each time and note any shifts between seasons that might influence shade cast by nearby trees or their influence over shade cast from planting areas.
Flower gardens should make an eye-catching statement, and repetition with color, shape, and height can help make this happen. Pairing blooms of similar hues together helps create harmony while using taller varieties with shorter ones can add contrast and visual interest. Likewise, experiment with adding fine or coarse foliage textures into the mix of blossoms for even greater visual impact.
Determine the Background
As it can be easy to overlook the background of your flower garden, it is vital that you put thought and planning into its design. A flower garden should not exist as an isolated unit but should complement rather than compete with the surrounding environment such as shade trees, shrubs or your home’s facade.
Your flower garden should ideally be situated against an attractive visual background, such as the wall of your house or fence in your yard. If this is not possible, consider using hardscaping elements like trellises or water features to set the stage for blooming flowers.
Finally, make sure that the boundaries of your flower garden are clearly demarcated using garden edging or stones so that grass and weeds don’t take over and spread themselves through it. A clearly-defined boundary helps you maintain your flowers more easily by making it easier for you to water and fertilize without exceeding their boundaries.