Unchieve year-round color in flower gardens requires selecting plants with staggered bloom times and working with professional garden designers who repeat key shapes or colors for visual unity.
Before beginning planning for your flower garden, familiarize yourself with its growing zone and soil quality. Understanding these factors will enable you to select plants that thrive in your particular garden environment.
Space
Flower garden design, beyond soil preparation and matching plants with site conditions, is often determined by the gardener himself or herself. While some prefer formal designs with straight edges and regular patterns, others like more natural approaches that feature winding curves and scattered clusters of blooming plants.
Before purchasing any plants, create a rough sketch of your flower garden on paper. This will allow you to visualize what the space will look like while also making sure that all your chosen plants can fit within it.
Sara recommends gardeners learn more about each flower’s color, bloom time and fragrance before making their purchase. She advises selecting show-stopping focal points which stand out from the bed, along with lower-profile flowering varieties that add year-round color and texture. Contrast is also key; grow dark foliage plants next to those with lighter flowers to add visual interest and visual depth.
Sunlight
Some of the most beautiful flower gardens may seem as though they just happened over time, with flowers seemingly blooming everywhere. Yet often these lavish cottage-style gardens are the result of careful planning and plant selection – taking into account both growth requirements and aesthetic considerations when selecting plants to fill space in a garden.
Start by clearly outlining the boundaries of your flower bed using garden edging or stones to prevent grass and weeds from invading its borders. Next, make note of how much sunlight each area receives – is it full sun (6+ hours a day), partial sun (3 to 5 hours of light per day), or shade? (Using a light meter can help track this data).
Select plants that will thrive in your environment and take into account bloom times and frequencies as well as whether or not they offer a fragrant scent when selecting plants for bloom time and frequency considerations. Also look for ones that provide foliage interest when their flowers are not in bloom.
Soil
Flower gardens add beauty and vibrancy to any landscape, while even amateur gardeners can craft stunning displays by carefully planning their design with low maintenance flowers that provide instantaneous curb appeal. Even novice gardeners can create amazing displays by choosing easy to grow varieties for their flowerbed.
Sun and soil should be the cornerstones of your flower garden design, with full sunlight required by most flowering plants for their best blooms. Choose an area in your yard that receives six to eight hours of direct sunlight every day for best results, with soil rich in organic matter and an optimal pH balance for growing beautiful blooms.
Experienced flower garden designers rely on different types of plants with staggered bloom times for year-round interest and visual impact, rather than even numbers of one species arranged symmetrically in groups. Aiming for odd numbers will produce more pleasing visual groupings than even numbers with even planting numbers arranged symmetrically in rows. Before digging holes for plants to fill your flower bed.
Water
Underneath the shade of a large tree can be difficult to cultivate due to limited soil availability and competition from tree roots, but selecting eye-catching plants with complementary colors and textures will create an eye-catching design that thrives under those circumstances.
Consider planting your flower garden with an incremental transition of height when planning it. Begin with taller plants at the back or center, transitioning gradually to medium height, then shorter flowers towards the front and edges for optimal sunlight distribution. This gives a sense of depth while guaranteeing all your plants receive proper care and sunlight exposure.
Select flowers with similar water and sunlight needs in groups to ensure each gets what it needs to flourish, making gardening simpler by preventing overwatering, underwatering or shading issues. Foliage also adds dimension and visual interest when flowers aren’t blooming – look for plants with various leaf shapes, variegated foliage or visual textures to create an eye-catching display lasting all season long.