Flower gardens provide ample room for imagination. Whether it is an eye-catching bed by your front curb, or a peaceful backyard oasis, there’s no doubting its power of transformation. All it takes to make this dream a reality is careful planning and preparation.
Fertile soil is essential to creating a successful garden, and many opt to supplement natural topsoil with commercial products that provide the appropriate balance of silt, sand and organic matter.
Choose a Location
Flower beds should be located where there is enough direct sunlight; many flowers require at least six hours of direct sun each day in order to bloom fully.
Once you have identified a space, take measurements and create a diagram outlining how you wish your flower garden to be organized. This will enable you to assess how large beds should be and where plantings will go.
Experienced garden designers know to incorporate plants with all-year interest and staggered bloom times into their designs, such as flowers or shrubs for texture and structure, particularly if you live in an area prone to snow or ice in winter months. Varying plant heights and sizes will add visual interest, while mixing colors creates a harmonious look. Don’t forget incorporating focal points like pergola draped with climbing roses or simple trellises as focal points as well!
Soil Preparation
Step two of creating a flower garden from scratch involves prepping the soil. Mixing organic matter such as compost, manure or shredded leaves into the soil provides greater water retention as well as better drainage to avoid flooding of the garden.
No matter the composition of your soil – sandy, silty or clay-rich – soil preparation is key to the success of any garden. Sandy and silty soils tend to feel gritty with large rocks present; while clay-rich soil feels sticky when wet with fine particle sizes.
An effective flower garden should offer four-season interest, so add shrubs that provide structure and four-season color such as hollyhocks, lilyturf, roses, and iris to provide structure and four-season color. When designing with shape consider gladioli or iris which offer vivid colors while their blade-like foliage adds textural contrast – repeating shapes throughout a garden creates cohesion and visual continuity – and when choosing perennials or adding fruit-bearing shrubs be sure to consider pollinators needs when selecting perennials or adding fruit-bearing shrubs containing pollinators friendly shrubs!
Planting
Flowers are the stars of any garden, adding color and beauty that uplifts spirits while drawing bees and pollinators into your landscape to fertilize it effectively.
One of the cardinal rules of flower gardens is to place them in well-drained soil, both throughout and especially for flower beds. Avoiding areas where water pools or stands after heavy rainfall and during spring thaw is key.
Your garden should either feature straight-edged flower beds, or more natural arrangements of ragged clumps; either style is fine. Just ensure it is close enough to a water source for easy watering and close enough to an electric source for powering tools and lights. Before planting, mix well-rotted manure or garden compost into the soil in order to improve its condition and help retain moisture better.
Maintenance
A beautifully-designed flower garden not only adds color, beauty and pollinator habitat but can also hide unsightly items in the yard such as air conditioners, sheds and trash cans.
Locate the area in your landscape where you would like to plant. Take note of how much sun the area receives; plants that need full sun will quickly wither away in shaded gardens while those adapted for partial shading could become leggy in direct sunlight.
Mark the outline of your new flower bed using spray paint or flour and then dig out within its boundaries with either a shovel, hoe or garden cart to ease this task.
Begin your garden with perennial flowers that come back year after year, such as phlox, foxglove, daisies, reblooming daylilies, rudbeckias, heucheras, coreopsis and sedum. Add shrubs for structure and four-season interest (crabapples, evergreen hollies or junipers); group them into threes. Finally add annuals that provide an unexpected pop of color while filling gaps between perennials.