Your garden can become an inviting habitat for bees, butterflies and hummingbirds by choosing native flowers that require less water and attract fewer pests.
Establish your USDA Hardiness Zone so you can select plants suited to the climate conditions in which you live, then prepare the soil before planting.
Location
Assuming you’re not growing heat-tolerant and desert plants, the optimal spot for a flower garden should receive at least six hours of direct sunlight each day. Full sunlight is usually ideal, although certain flowering plants may still thrive even in part-shade or even shaded locations as long as they get enough light.
Make Your Bed: When starting a garden from scratch or adding flowers to existing landscape, soil preparation is the cornerstone of success. Aim for loose, rich loam that has been raked, aerated, and amended with compost.
Design with fragrance and movement: When planting flowers, take note of wind patterns so the scents from them drift towards your house or patio area. Stagger bloom times so your garden remains attractive throughout the year, including spring-blooming perennials, summer annuals and fall-blooming ornamental shrubs for maximum appeal.
Soil
Soil plays an integral part in your flower garden’s success; an ideal soil should contain plenty of vital nutrients while not being too sandy.
Your flower garden’s soil can be improved by adding compost, rotted manure or another organic material such as mulch. A soil test may also be conducted prior to digging up the bed in order to establish what its pH level and nutrient levels are.
Plan a well-rounded flower garden by selecting both annuals and perennials to provide year-round interest and minimize pruning work. Opt for plants that bloom at different times so there’s always something in bloom, mixing up color combinations for variety, arranging taller plants toward the back, while shorter plants near each other for depth, as well as placing those with similar growth habits close together.
Plants
Your choice of flower garden depends on both its purpose and conditions in your yard. Utilizing USDA growing zone maps will enable you to understand which plants thrive there as well as frost dates that inform planting seasons and schedules.
Include a variety of heights and colors in the garden to keep viewers intrigued throughout the season. Aim for balance among plants with blooming times that vary so there will always be flowers blooming – Dan Hinkley of Plant Hunter’s Journal is an expert at selecting plant combinations rather than individual species for his work on The Greatest Gardens on Earth.
At his advice, perennial coreopsis (also known as tickseed) combined with daisies is an excellent combination for creating an eye-catching mixed border that brings color all year long – from spring through fall! Flowers and foliage combine together to form a meadow-like setting while drawing pollinators to your space. When designing the space, make sure to consider each plant’s mature height so it doesn’t interfere with walkways or block windows.
Maintenance
An ideal flower garden requires regular care, from watering and picking spent blooms to fertilization and maintenance. Your choice of plant varieties may require different levels of maintenance; all plants benefit from consistent moisture levels and nutrients, so take note of any information found on seed packets or plant tags for each one.
Once you’re ready to plant, clear away grass and weeds from the area before prepping the soil according to what’s recommended for your type of garden. Add edging to define space more easily while creating paths between flower beds so as not to step on delicate plants when moving through your garden.
Plan on deadheading regularly and watering the soil — not the flowers — in order to reduce fungal problems and encourage second flush blooms in your flower garden. By being diligent with these simple maintenance tasks, your flower garden could last all year round!