When designing a flower garden, it’s essential to take note of its specific conditions for best results. Experienced garden designers typically include both perennials and annuals to provide year-round color.
Begin by outlining the borders of your garden with edging or other landscape materials to keep weeds and grass away from your flowers and to make maintenance simpler. Doing this will also keep the grass and weeds at bay and facilitate easier garden management.
Location
At first glance, location is of primary concern when creating a flower garden. From lining your front doorwalkway to filling in around an arbor, a flower bed must work in with both your home’s architecture and lighting conditions to be successful.
Experts advise assessing both sunlight availability and available space before planting flowers in any location. Most flowers require at least six hours of daily sunlight exposure in order to thrive.
Flower gardens typically include paths and access aisles to make maintenance and enjoyment of blooms easier, and selecting plants with staggered bloom times to add year-round interest – choose shrubs for winter color, perennials for summer/autumn blooms and annuals as fillers for slow seasons.
Soil
Flower gardens without an obvious focal point can become chaotic. From stunning collections of blooms to hardscaping elements, something should attract the eye and set the scene for what lies ahead.
Expert garden designers employ repetition to achieve a harmonious design in their flower gardens, advises Wiley. By repeating certain colors or shapes throughout, they create a coherent appearance without appearing disjointed.
Mixing plants of differing textures and sizes will also add interest, creating an eye-catching display. Pair fine-leafed kale with ornamental grasses with spikey ornamental spikes or group dainty perennials near tall shrubs and herbaceous perennials for an unexpected visual experience. You’ll discover this design trick produces richer results than simple symmetrical arrangements; strive to incorporate odd numbers of each plant to avoid an overwhelming “soup-to-nuts” look.
Sunlight
An effective flower garden begins with accurate measurements and careful layout. Before digging begins, draw out your new or revised flower bed on paper so all of your ideas fit within its confines and create a cohesive design.
Experienced flower garden designers incorporate plants with staggered bloom times into their design to provide year-round interest and color. You can add visual accents like decorative trellises, birdbaths, or other landscape features that serve as visual frames for your flowers, drawing the eye back into your garden and providing the backdrop necessary for blooming blooms.
As soon as your flower beds have been meticulously weeded, consider adding an edge around each bed to set the flowers apart from their surrounding landscape and prevent grass and weeds from creeping in. Edging can be made out of gravel, stones or any other material to define and add texture to your garden.
Water
Flower beds can be easily established on level ground, although slight or even steep slopes may work with careful design. Steeper slopes may require terracing to protect soil quality for healthy flower growth.
Before selecting flowers, draft a sketch of your garden plan. This will enable you to visualize its layout and make necessary modifications before planting begins.
Pick plants based on year-round interest, bloom time, show-stopping focal points and bonus attributes like fragrance or whether they attract butterflies and pollinators. Arrange plants so they do not obscure windows or doors when placing in your garden and remember leaves will provide much-needed background color even when flowers have faded.
Plants
Flowers are at the core of every garden. Their vibrant blooms can bring color and vibrance to any landscape; however, to guarantee success in planting them successfully.
Select a mix of perennials and annuals for all-season bloom. Perennials like peonies and lilies have long bloom times, while annuals such as zinnias and impatiens add color when other flowers start to fade in late summer or fall.
Gruping plants with similar water and sunlight requirements makes caring for an entire planting easier, as does playing around with texture and size by mixing fine foliage with coarse leaves or tall with short plants for visual contrast. Repetition of core colors across an arrangement helps ensure a cohesive look – expert flower garden designers often plant odd numbers of each kind of plant–three, five, seven–in order to achieve dynamic looks.