Flowers bring beauty and artistry to any garden. When planning a flower garden, take into account color combinations, bloom times and foliage in order to achieve a harmonious design.
Repetition is key when designing a flower garden. By repeating plant shapes, colors, and heights throughout a garden’s design, repetition helps achieve flowering cohesion.
Location
Flowers are beneficial to the environment by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen through photosynthesis, stabilizing soil and preventing erosion. When selecting where to site your flower beds, think carefully about their visibility from both private outdoor spaces as well as by neighbors or passersby.
Assemble your desired blooms, considering their colors together and how well they coordinate. Colors adjacent on the color wheel look lovely together; similarly complementary blooms such as irises and peonies look wonderful together too. Foliage adds visual interest even after flower blooms have gone past their prime.
A garden that features well-kept grass lawns framed by proportioned beds produces an appealing effect. No matter if the beds are gravel or box edging beds, they should be neatly planted and any empty spaces between should be filled judiciously with ornamental plants that give a pleasing aesthetic – an effect made even more apparent when combined with water features like fountains. — Isaac Ware (1756).
Plants
Flower garden layout is entirely up to you; however, there are certain guidelines you should keep in mind in order to create an appealing space.
One of the key aspects of successful gardening lies in selecting plant species suitable to the growing conditions in your yard. For instance, planting showy perennials like peonies where ground conditions remain shaded all summer would not yield as many blooms. Instead, more resilient shrub species would likely do better.
Repetition is another design trick to create consistency and cohesion in a flower garden. By planting several core colors or types of flowers throughout, year-round color will be guaranteed, and odd numbers tend to look more appealing than even ones. Tinkering with texture and size can also add depth and interest; for instance using both fine foliage (marigolds) and coarse leaves (canna lilies) creates visual interest, or combine tall plants with shorter ones – the results could be surprising!
Foliage
When we envision gardens of flowers, our mind often wanders directly to breathtaking blooms that instantly draw our eyes. But there are other noteworthy attributes found among perennials, shrubs and trees which contribute to making a garden beautiful: color, shape and texture are key factors. They should all play an integral part in improving its design.
Location plays an essential part in creating the ideal floral display in any garden. On steep slopes, for instance, more durable groundcovers may make more of an impact than fragile blooms that require support or staking.
Height should also be taken into consideration when planning a flower garden. As a general guideline, plant plants of various heights in an arrangement according to their mature overall size; taller plants should be at the back for added depth. It may also be wise to incorporate plants that bloom at different times so as one crop begins to fade, another one emerges – giving your garden depth and layers.
Texture
Location and texture are equally vital components of a flower garden design. The best designs use repetition of color, shape and plant species to form a harmonious arrangement that feels balanced and complete.
Colors adjacent on the color wheel, like pink and purple, pair nicely together, as do plants with striking foliage. Foliage adds interest and can fill in gaps left by larger perennial plants.
Experienced flower garden designers use plants with staggered bloom times so that something blooming always offers visual interest – creating gardens that do not look “stagnant” during midsummer but provide continuous visual interest.
Imagine your garden as an arrangement – it should include greenery, focal flowers with symmetrical petals, filler flowers that are airier or delicate (such as snapdragon or feverfew) and the foreground and background should complement but not compete with this vibrant display of floral beauty.