Design Tips for Your Flower Garden

Are you a bit scared of the idea of designing your flower garden?  It can seem like a big project, and you certainly don't want to get it wrong.  Taking your flowers back out of the ground because you don't like the design can be heartbreaking.

The key is getting it right the first time, and that's not as hard as it may seem.  If you're artistic,  a great garden design may be easy for you.  The types and varieties of flowers, their heights and textures, and their placement in the garden may come very naturally to you.  If you're not an artist, these decisions may be a bit of a struggle.  But you don't have to be an artist or professional to have a garden you can enjoy!  Some simple guidelines will help you create the garden you've always imagined.

Texture is one of the most important elements in your garden design, and textural variety is key to an aesthetically pleasing garden.  Uniformity and similarity can be boring.  Choose plants that have different heights, different size flowers, and leaves of different sizes and shapes.

Different flowers bloom at different times throughout the growing season, and choosing flowers according to their blooming cycle will extend your enjoyment of your garden for as long as possible.  You can, of course, take a different approach and plan your garden around a specific season.

A spring garden, for example, would feature the colors of flowering bulbs and bushes.  The pinks, yellows, reds and purples of tulips, daffodils and azaleas would be the stars of this type of garden.

Your summer garden is probably the most versatile, with whites and blues mixing well with both spring and fall colors.  A garden that features red, white and blue flowers would be the perfect backdrop for your July 4th party!

The colors of a fall garden are deeper, with reds, deep yellows and oranges predominating.  These look best with the striking reds, oranges and browns of the fall leaves.

Unless you're going for a naturalistic, wildflower look, you'll want to choose flowers in colors that complement each other, no matter what the season may be.  Colors that work well together will give your garden a pleasing, refined look.

Give some thought to where a flower will be planted.  For plantings along a wall, taller plants should go up against the wall, with progressively shorter plants towards the border.  The same would be true of an ornamental circle of flowers, where the tallest flowers would be planted at the center and the shortest flowers at the outer edge.

Finally, consider mixing annuals and perennials in you garden.  The foundation of your garden can bloom year after year, maturing into substantial plants, while you get the pleasure of choosing different annuals each year to fill in the gaps.  This will let you work a bit on your garden each year, without having to redesign it on a yearly basis.