Similar to real estate, repetition is key when designing flower gardens. Experienced gardeners understand how important it is to repeat key colors, shapes and plant species in their garden designs in order to create visual cohesion and ensure visual consistency across their garden spaces.
Arranging a flower garden requires placing tall plants at the back and shorter ones at the front for maximum depth and dimension. This will add depth and dimension to your space!
Location
Flower gardens come in all forms and sizes, from formal rectangle beds beneath front windows to long beds that line walkways to sprawling manor-style gardens on estates or private homes. No matter the shape and size, every gardener should understand certain basic principles when planning their floral masterpiece.
Assess the site where you intend to install your garden and study its features such as soil quality and sunlight or shade levels; this information will enable you to choose plants suitable for this environment.
Experienced flower garden designers suggest grouping flowers by their blooming periods to ensure that, when certain blooms fade and die off, others are already blossoming to provide new color. Furthermore, this ensures continuity across your landscape when other flowers have completed their season and leave no areas without color.
Focal Point
When designing a flower garden layout, selecting an attractive focal point is of utmost importance. It could be anything from strategically-placed garden ornaments or an eye-catching plant to something as subtle as an eye-catching ornament that provides year-round enjoyment of your landscape design.
Focal points in gardens are designed to direct your eye in various directions throughout the space. For instance, placing a large urn at the top of a staircase will draw people down towards it and draw their interest to what lies below it.
Expert designers often prefer grouping plants in odd numbers rather than evens to create more visual interest and avoid an odd-ball look. It is therefore wise to sketch your design before beginning planting or buying plants; this will allow you to determine the size and shape of flower beds, as well as deciding on an edging strategy for your garden.
Background
As important as it is to choose flowers that can thrive in your region and soil conditions, gardeners also have the freedom to experiment with color, form and texture. When creating the overall look of their flower garden, design expert Piet Oudolf suggests considering shape first when designing it – planting groups of spires, umbels or daisies together in groups can add visual interest and make for more dynamic aesthetics in a garden design.
Other aspects that influence the appearance of a flower garden include foliage and texture use, bloom time and color selection and hardscaping techniques. If available space allows, adding a trellis or bird bath may also add visual interest and complete your flower garden design.
Experts advise planting odd numbers of the same kind of flowers to create an even look in your flower bed.
Paths
As much as soil, water and light conditions play a vital role in creating flower garden ideas, style and personal goals can also have an enormous impact. A formal look might require well-defined beds with straight lines while cottage-style gardens might employ more natural designs with meandering paths and irregular clusters of blooms.
Every bed that extends wider than you can comfortably reach across needs working pathways that enable you to weed and tend the flowers without trampling on them or compacting the soil. Consider using gravel, wood chip or pavestone to define these pathways visually while creating functional pathways.
Professionally designed flower gardens often combine plants in odd numbers, such as three or five of one type, for an engaging garden design. This creates a more dynamic effect than even plant groups and helps avoid creating an appearance of various bloom types all in one area. Try mixing coarse leaves with fine ones, placing taller varieties behind soft ground cover plants, and playing around with textures by mixing coarse with fine leaves or mixing tall varieties behind shorter varieties.