Flower Garden Design

A flower garden design is a wonderful way to add color and warmth to a sunny area in your backyard landscape. While there are some flowers that can handle part sun to shade, many annuals plants and intensely blooming perennials, will need a good amount of sun.

Identify the location of your garden, and then measure it to be sure that you purchase a sufficient amount of flowers. A flower garden designs that isn’t adequately filled in by loads and loads of blooms and color, is going to be a huge disappointment.

I have made the mistake of skimping on my annuals plants in the past. When the flowers grew to full size, they did not fill in the area, and did not create the dramatic impact I was hoping for. While you need to allow some space between flowers when planting so that they have room to fully develop, do not over-estimate the amount of room you’ll need, or you may be disappointed with the end result.

When planning a flower garden design, the way in which the landscaping plants are positioned will depend on where your flower garden is located in your yard. Is the flower garden going to be located in the middle of the yard so that you will be able to view it from all sides, or will it be located along a wall or a fence, so there’ll be a more defined front and back to the design?

If you plan on locating your flower garden where it will be viewed from multiple angles, you’ll want to design it so that the tallest plants are located at the center, the medium height plants are located in front of those and the shortest plants are then located all around the edge. If your garden is located against a backdrop, you’ll simply have the tallest plants at the back, the medium height plants in front of those, and the shortest plants all the way in the front.

So, how do you determine which plants to select for your flower garden design? I like to focus on color first! If the garden is against a backdrop, what color is the backdrop? Is it a light, muted color that could use some pizzazz to brighten things up? Or is it a dark color that needs to be accented by lighter colored plants and flowers?

If your garden is going to be located in the middle of a lawn you will have all options open to you as far as what colors you utilize, but will probably want to select those colors that will “pop” against the green of the grass.

To create a sensational, season long interest in your garden you may want to combine annuals plants with perennial plants to achieve the look you want. You’ll also want to use a variety of foliage to add interest to the design.

One very attractive design I found had cannas located at the center (depending on the variety, cannas can grow from 60 to 96 inches tall – have foliage that varies from light green stripes to deep violet, and have flowers that are red, yellow, white, orange and more), ornamental grasses (opens new window) around the cannas (ornamental grasses are either annuals or perennials – with the annuals offering a wide variety of colors and textures to add interest to the garden), and marigolds and/or petunias around the base.

You'll need to be careful about combining colors that will compliment each other with regards to the flowers you select.

For example, red and yellow flowers compliment each other, as do purple and yellow. White flowers can be used with virtually any color. My preference is to keep color combinations to no more that two to three colors. Adding more colors than that will decrease the impact that each color will have.

With regards to the foliage, it’s nice to have contrast between the plants that are sitting next to each other. For example, if you choose cannas with light green stripped foliage, an ornamental grass that has a deep auburn color would stand out well against it. Play around with these designs and colors a bit, and find out what works best for you. Remember that there are no mistakes, just learning experiences!

Once you’ve decided on, and purchased, your plants, you’ll need to prepare the soil. Add several bags of top soil and compost material to give the flowers a good healthy base with which to start. Plant the flowers close enough to each other so that when they are full grown, they will form a relatively tight mat or carpet. Due to the fast pace with which annual flowers and plants grow, there will not be a need for any landscaping fabric or a weed barrier. The plants will soon smoother out any chance the weeds have of getting established.

Any flower garden design that you establish in your landscape will need regular watering in order to keep all of the plants happy and healthy and in top performance all season long! Annuals, in particular, that don’t receive enough water will start to wilt and droop quickly, giving you a ”Water SOS” sign that is unmistakable. It is also advisable to establish some type of regular fertilization routine. Of course, I’m a huge advocate of organic fertilizer!

There are many types of organic fertilizers available for sale, and you always have the option of making your own. One method of making your own fertilizer is through the use of compost, which is the technique I use in my own yard. I was able to find one seemingly straight-forward recipe for organic fertilizer (opens new window) on the web. I have not tried to use this myself as I prefer to use my homemade compost.

Whatever you decide, make sure that you are feeding the new plants in your flower garden design some high quality grub! They’ll thank you for it by rewarding you with blooms all season long!

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