Add fragrance and beauty to your outdoor spaces by planting a flower garden. To ensure success with this project, start with basic flower gardening principles like height plantings, colors, textures and four-season interest.
Plant perennial flowers for long-lasting color or annuals like petunias and pansies for quick summer blooms. When designing your garden, repeat shapes and colors for visual harmony.
Location
The ideal location for your garden depends on its purpose: cutting gardens used to produce bouquets typically need full sun but may do well even in partial shaded spots. Shrubs and perennials that provide year-round color may be ideal choices in areas where there will be minimal maintenance needs.
Once you know where you want to plant, learn your USDA growing zone and research which flowers flourish in that particular location. Also keep track of first and last frost dates so you can plan the timing of your plantings more effectively.
Combining flower colors, heights and bloom times with each other is crucial for visual interest in any garden design. Renowned garden designer Piet Oudolf suggests using shapes as a guide as well; many perennial flowers share similar flower forms like spires, plumes and daisies, while annuals typically take on circular or round forms.
Soil
Your flower garden requires healthy soil to flourish. Ideally, its composition should be loose and porous with enough structure to support roots while being rich in organic matter such as manure, compost, peat moss or grass clippings – this helps improve sandy soils while correcting clay ones so water can seep into them more readily.
Before planting, work the soil to eliminate clumps and roots. Also consider spreading a layer of compost or mulch over the bed – this helps prevent weeds while conserving moisture.
Select seeds according to their growing requirements, and keep a daily journal on how the plants progress. Take note of how much sunlight an area receives throughout the day; full-sun perennials will quickly burn under harsh lighting, while shade-loving species like Heuchera become scorched under too much direct light.
Light
Flower gardens come in all sizes: window boxes or porch containers up to full garden beds. No matter its size, begin by clearing away any grass or weeds as well as loosening up soil with a garden rake before placing any plants or seedlings into it.
Before choosing a sunny spot for your flower garden, observe it for several days to assess whether or not it gets enough sun for your chosen plants. Perennials that require six hours of direct sunlight will likely perish in shaded environments while hostas and outdoor ferns do well with indirect light sources such as overhead fluorescent lamps.
Step two of flower care maintenance should involve matching maintenance efforts to their specific needs. Seed packets and plant tags offer helpful details regarding planting time, depth and spacing but it is equally essential to understand how much water, fertilizer and pest control each variety requires – for instance annuals may need more frequent watering than perennials.
Water
Hydrating your flowers is essential to their wellbeing, especially during hot temperatures and winds that can quickly transform lush blooms into wilted heaps. By creating a watering schedule and other measures tailored specifically for each season, you can ensure a vibrant flower garden that lasts all season long.
Make sure your soil is rich, loose and well-draining before adding all-purpose balanced fertilizer and plenty of organic matter. If using bagged soil mix, inspect it prior to purchase in order to identify any rocks, decayed wood or manmade rubbish that might clog up its root run of plants.
Never work your soil when it is too wet; this damages its structure. To water efficiently, using a moisture sensor or meter helps determine exactly how much your flowers require; eliminating guesswork that leads to over-watering that kills roots or under-watering that starves them of necessary nourishment. For optimal results, early morning irrigation should be used so as to avoid plant scald.