A carefully planned flower garden provides an ongoing source of color during the growing season and attracts pollinators. One way to ensure continuous color effect is by stagger planting flowers according to their bloom times.
An effective design begins with careful evaluation of both its location and soil conditions. Furthermore, incorporate four-season interest such as shrubs with four season blooms or plants with appealing leaf shapes or colors into your plan.
1. Think About the Light
Light is key when it comes to creating the ultimate flower garden design. Most flowering plants need at least six to eight hours of full sun per day for proper growth; some varieties need even more. Spend a few days monitoring where sunlight hits during different times of the day in the area where you plan to plant your garden and take notes of where sunlight hits at various times of day.
Consider also how accessible your garden will be when in bloom; you must be able to tend the plants and trim any deadheads without accidentally trampling or damaging your blooms. If possible, create a pathway through your flower garden that prevents people from trampling on it, detracting from its beauty and ruining it!
When selecting colors for your flower garden, a color wheel is an effective tool to assist you. Shades of the same hue, such as pink, can look beautiful together while colors opposite each other on the wheel such as purple and yellow are often complementary. Remember to include foliage colors for added visual interest even after flowers have died down.
2. Think About the Space
Before coming up with flower garden ideas, take time to assess your space and how they would integrate with the rest of the landscape. A flower garden that doesn’t match can look disjointed at best or distracting at worst.
A beautiful flower garden makes use of a focal point to draw in viewers’ eyes. This could be anything from an eye-catching cluster of blooms or unique plant to garden art that stands out.
If you have a large area to work with, consider breaking your flower garden up into sections for easier management. When placing the sections together, think about how color and shape of each flower works together; plants with symmetrical petals and flowers that bloom together often look best when placed close together; odd numbers of flowers tend to look better than even ones; use shrubs such as easy-to-maintain rose shrubs as structures or four-season interest.
3. Think About the Backdrop
Location is key when designing flower gardens; just as real estate matters, so does flower garden design. A bed placed haphazardly among green lawns can appear haphazard and disorganized while one that blends seamlessly into its environment makes more of an impression of intent and purposefulness.
If you want your pink David Austin roses to stand out, keep other early summer bloomers within reach or plan to replace them later when their blooms fade – the same is true of showier flowers like peonies or lilies.
Add plants that bloom throughout the growing season for constant color and visual interest, or play around with texture and size to add variety and add visual contrast. Try grouping plants by height or texture or playing with proportions by mixing fine foliage (such as marigolds) with coarse foliage (canna lilies), creating visual interest or playing around with leaf shapes to add visual distinction.
4. Think About the Plants
Flowers need the right conditions in which to thrive; otherwise they risk not thriving at all or even dying out completely. Knowing which individual plants require specific growing conditions is also critical when designing your flower garden design. Planting inappropriate blooms could result in their premature demise or never thriving at all.
Pay careful consideration to flower sizes and stagger bloom times throughout the year. Experienced garden designers use a color wheel to select flowers with complementary hues; colors opposite one another on the wheel (such as yellow and purple) tend to look best together visually. Don’t forget the unique textures found within foliage that add visual interest!
Be sure to give your plants enough room for their full size; otherwise they might not get the nutrients or air circulation they require for growth, leading them to succumb to fungal infections like root rot. Like any landscape project, developing your flower garden requires trial and error before reaching its ideal design.