Flower gardens bring color, texture and fragrance into any landscape while simultaneously drawing bees, butterflies and other pollinators to your yard.
Step one of creating a flower garden is selecting its location. Most varieties require full sun; others can thrive in part sun or shade conditions. Next comes prepping your soil before planting your seeds.
Location
Location for a flower garden depends on what kind of blooms you want to cultivate; for instance, lush hydrangeas prefer an area with both morning sun and afternoon shade while dazzling sunflowers require full sun throughout the day.
As part of your planning, also take into account how easy it will be for you to access your garden. A path or walkway will make working, trimming and treating flower beds much simpler without harming any of the plants in them.
Make sure the soil is rich with nutrients and free of weeds before planting flowers or shrubs. Before amending with all-purpose balanced fertilizer and layer of compost or other organic matter, work this material into the top 6-8 inches of the soil where most flower and shrub roots reside. Doing this when wet may damage its structure and make it less welcoming for plant seeds and seedlings to germinate successfully.
Create a garden with multiple layers of flowers of various heights, sizes and colors for maximum visual appeal when in bloom and texture as the plants mature. Focal flowers like roses and tulips work particularly well when combined with filler blooms such as snapdragons and feverfew.
Soil
Soil is the cornerstone of any flower garden, as it holds plants upright while channeling water and air directly to their roots. Additionally, soil provides essential nutrients, making the perfect pH balance essential to plant health.
As the first step of creating a new flower bed, the initial step should be preparing its area. If you plan on replacing a lawn, use a shovel to cut up and remove existing grass; if preserving existing perennials such as roses or hostas is important to you, divide and transplant any overgrown clumps so they can return to health.
Purchase screened soil from your local gardening center to avoid rocks and debris that could block the roots of your flowers, and add compost to provide extra nutrients to them. The ideal mix for flower gardening would include organic matter-rich soil/fertilizer mixes that supply essential vitamins to their blooms.
Plants
Add flowers to your garden for color, fragrance and definition. From ground plantings to porch and patio planters containing flower gardens – consider selecting blooming species native to your region that thrive in its growing conditions – plants with strong root systems can perform best when used as part of flower beds because they’re tailored perfectly to the climate and soil in which they live.
Tall flowers like hollyhocks and gladioli give gardens height. These taller blooms serve as the backbone of a garden while shorter perennial plants and annuals serve as fillers and spillers.
Annuals like petunias offer bright splashes of color in the shade, making them great additions to planters. When planting them in this way, create an eye-catching arrangement by layering taller plants as the “thriller,” framing and surrounding them with medium height plants for balance, then filling out with lower growing ones for spillers – the mix should appear balanced from all directions; complementary colors such as blue and purple blend well together!
Maintenance
Maintaining a flower garden requires providing it with water and fertilizer according to each plant’s growing requirements, while trimming off spent blooms regularly to encourage energy to go towards foliage production and winter survival.
Flower beds that don’t receive enough sun may struggle to bloom as expected, which should at least 6 hours of direct sunlight each day.
Next step in designing the garden should be considering colors and shapes of flowers. World-renowned Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf advises designing with shape in mind; for instance he suggests using a color wheel as a reference, since flowers in shades of the same hue, like pink, look pleasing when planted together. Furthermore, Oudolf suggests choosing flower shapes with unique textures as visual appeal after blooms have fallen off, along with planting groundcovers for added structure in the garden.