Flower gardens not only add aesthetic charm and environmental benefits to your home and neighborhood, they can also contribute to improved air quality.
Soil quality is absolutely key when planting flowers; poor conditions may limit their access to enough moisture and essential nutrients.
Mix heights to avoid an uninteresting appearance. Add shrubs for four-season interest.
Location
Flower gardens add beauty and pollinators such as bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and other pollinators to landscapes. Furthermore, these plants serve an important function by producing chlorophyll and absorbing carbon dioxide through photosynthesis to reduce CO2 emissions in the air.
First step to starting a flower garden is finding the ideal location. Choose an area with rich, loamy soil. When choosing plants for your garden, keep your USDA growing zone in mind as any that don’t thrive there may not return the following year.
Use curves instead of straight lines when designing the layout for your flower garden, as this creates an aesthetic that’s easier on the eyes and walking around it. Many flower gardens combine perennials and annuals so blooming colors remain visible from spring through fall – this requires careful planning so as to maintain an orderly sequence of hues within your garden.
Soil
Flower gardening relies heavily on soil as the medium for flower growth. Soil is composed of minerals, organic matter, air and microorganisms; together they make up Earth’s “skin”, providing vital support to all life on our planet.
An ideal soil for flower gardens should provide rich, loamy soil that offers all of the nutrients that plants require to thrive and can hold onto water for absorption by their roots.
To prepare the soil for your flower garden, it will be necessary to clear away any existing turf. There are multiple methods of doing so – including digging it out by hand and using plastic, metal, brick or wooden landscape edging; alternatively you could cover the area with newspaper and allow it to decompose over time.
Water
Your choice of flowers will have an enormous effect on how your garden appears. A combination of heights and colors brings visual interest, while repetition of plants, shapes, and colors will create harmony. Add some shrubs for structure and four-season color; consider native perennials for creating bee, butterfly, and hummingbird-friendly habitats while lowering maintenance burden.
Before planting, dig holes that are deep enough to accommodate the root ball of your plant (whether cuttings from an established flower, seeds or bulbs). Water thoroughly and deeply so as to allow your soil to become saturated – shallow surface watering discourages root development while encouraging shallow-rooted plants more susceptible to drought conditions.
Sunlight
Beyond soil preparation and matching plants to their sites, one of the key components in designing your flower garden is understanding its exposure to sunlight. This will enable you to select an array of annual and perennial flowers best suited to meet your requirements.
Plants need full sun (6 or more hours of direct sunlight per day) in order to grow and flourish, but it’s still possible to have a successful flower garden in part shade (3-5 hours per day of direct sunlight) or deep shade (3 or fewer hours).
Add height and structure to your garden with shrubs that bring seasonal color, evergreens, and twisty branches that create texture. Don’t forget about native species for supporting pollinators populations in your garden!
Pruning
Many flowering shrubs such as forsythia, lilacs, and crepe myrtles should be pruned right after their blooms have finished blooming to avoid cutting off next year’s flowers. As flowering vines such as azaleas and mountain laurel use wood from previous seasons for their blooms to appear, pruning them immediately after blooming is essential.
Flowering shrubs add structure and four-season color to any garden, while selecting plants of differing heights and shapes will help create an appealing landscape design.
Perennial flowers like phlox, foxglove and cranesbill geraniums provide continuity in your garden with their repeat bloom times. Try staggering their bloom time so they are flowering at different points throughout the season.