Flower gardens can add beauty and color to your landscape. Carefully select which varieties to plant where, and make sure that at least six hours of sun penetrates their beds daily.
Choose native plants to attract pollinators such as bees and other pollinators, and pay close attention to foliage colors, shapes and textures in your garden design. Blending heights and bloom times keeps it interesting throughout the year.
Preparation
Flowers beds can be placed wherever a gardener wishes; only their creativity limits where or how they should go. Common options include rectangular beds under front windows, long beds lining entranceway walkways, or rows surrounding a home. Flowering shrubs such as azaleas and lilacs add year-round interest for additional structure within landscape designs.
Before creating your flower garden, take into account both your climate zone and soil type. Different flowers require different levels of sunlight for photosynthetic growth.
Prior to beginning any digging for your flower bed, always contact your utility company and check for any buried lines in the area where you intend to place it. It is also beneficial to work with moist soil – dry compacted soil may impede plant health and development.
Arguably the world-famous Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf states that mixing heights and colors is key to creating a successful flower garden design. Utilizing perennial plants that come in shapes such as spires, globes, daisies, buttons, umbels, or screens may also add visual harmony.
Planting
When planting, it’s essential to adhere to the recommended spacing of plants. Follow the directions on your seed packet or plant label so you’re not planting too closely together.
Once your flower bed is prepped and ready to plant, it’s time to get down into the soil! Keep in mind that each species thrives best in certain types of soil; otherwise, blooming season could end in dismay!
Make sure your flower garden also incorporates grasses and shrubs for texture, structure and color – as well as winter interest when your flowering plants have died back. Look for plants with interesting foliage textures such as sword-like gladioli or fine lacy irises for even less weeding and more cohesive aesthetic – adding these can help reduce weeding efforts while providing a cohesive look. Additionally, plant in blocks or drifts so bees have easier time finding flowers on their foraging trips!
Maintenance
As with any garden, flower gardens require constant attention in order to look their best. Flower gardens require ongoing maintenance in order to stay looking their best.
Deadheading flowers to encourage continual blooms and pulling weeds early is an easy and beneficial task for young and adult gardeners-in-training; not to mention that it protects your plant against disease and insect damage! This simple task makes an impactful statement about their commitment.
Carefully water your flower garden to avoid splashing and fungal disease from oversaturation of its soil with too much moisture, as well as choosing plants suitable to the climate in which you reside. Familiarizing yourself with your USDA growing zone before purchasing plants will prevent you from purchasing plants that won’t thrive there.
As part of your garden design, keep plant heights, colors and textures in mind when selecting plants. Diversifying heights and sizes adds visual interest while repeating specific plant shapes, flowers and foliage can create continuity.
Design
Flower gardens add color, texture and interest to the landscape while welcoming butterflies and other pollinators into their domain.
Designing a flower bed may seem intimidating, but there are some key principles you need to keep in mind. First of all, you need to choose a size and shape of bed; secondly, decide what kind of plants will reside within.
Layering plants is an effective way to give a garden bed more visual dimension and depth. This process entails placing taller shrubs or plants at the back, medium-size varieties in the middle, and then bedding types with smaller leaves at the front of the bed – with each layer using various plants that vary in height, color or bloom time.
An excellent place to find ideas on which flowers to plant is your local extension office or public gardens that are open to the public. There may even be lists with information on which varieties require sun or shade exposure and whether or not they can withstand deer browsing!