You can plan from the beginning to have perennials which bloom at different seasons, (for example, iris, which has the peak of its bloom just as the peony season begins).
Know accurately when the perennials bloom and then plan to fill in the gaps left by their passing with prolific and quick-growing annuals. You can plan to have a potting bed, perhaps in your vegetable garden or in a sheltered spot behind your tool house or garage, where you can grow extra annuals as well as those perennials which do not mind being transplanted. Then when the tulip season passes, for example, you can fill in with another tall bulb, a summer-flowering one, such as, perhaps, the canna lily.
Your plan should be made on paper, with the shape of the bed or border sketched in, and the position of the plants indicated. Perhaps one of the most common and feasible design for the average 60 x 100 foot lot, or even the half-acre lot is a border running the length and rear wall of the back yard. This can be a mixed border of summer-flowering bulbs, perennials and annuals, backed by shrubs.
Other designs can be planned for the center of the lawn, for the foundation planting, for the pathways to the house and for the sides of the house. Semi-formal or formal gardens can have borders or beds laid out alongside of and divided by walks.
In planning your border, provide for tall screening plants that will form a background for the shorter plants. The screening plants may need staking but they should be sturdy. If you have a wide border, over 6 feet, you will need a narrow path in front of the screening plants for cultivating and tending. The centre border plants are of medium height, and can be chosen for vivid colour. If you are planning a wide border, relatively tall plants such as iris go here. In the foreground is your edging, composed of such neat and plainly visible flowers as: clipped green perennials, or low-growing petunia, ageratum, pansies, dwarf marigolds or sweet alyssum. It is wise in planning to have beds or borders that are visible from your windows and close to your terraces and gathering places outdoors.
The special planting set close to the house is called foundation planting and has great importance since it improves and enhances the proportions of your house as well as relates the house to the grounds.
Evergreens are widely used for foundation planting not only because they can thrive in the shade of the house, but because of their year-round good looks.
If you have not used evergreens elsewhere, though, it is a mistake to suddenly use them at the foundation. The contrast will be too sharp; the evergreens are apt to look forbidding. There remains a wide choice of flowering shrubs, dwarf fruit trees, roses and cushion chrysanthemums that will lend colour to your foundation design in spring, summer and fall. Japanese red leaf barberry, floribunda roses, flowering quince and forsythia are among the bushes and plants that can be used.
While it is tempting to try one of each of the nursery's evergreen specimens in your foundation planting, this should, of course, be avoided. On the other hand, contrast tall and low-growing types: use stiff-needled pines with feathery juniper with broadleaved laurel and rhododendron.
In your preliminary planning, draw to scale the relationship between your house elevation and the foundation shrubs and trees as they will look at mature height. Perhaps some of those you've selected will be too tall for your house, obscuring your windows and making the house gloomy inside. In that case, you don't want them.
In general, because your entrance is the most important feature of your house facade, you start your planning with it in mind, using shrubs that direct the eye toward the door. The planting in front of the house is usually bowl-shaped in its overall outline. This gives the impression of a broad base to the house. In some places, let the wall show to the foundation. Put the tallest shrubbery at the corners of your house.
The proper arrangement of flower beds in your garden and attentive care to them can insure you a continuing bloom of lovely flowers year after year. For with planning, it is possible to maintain flowers in your garden during the entire length of the growing season.
Borders and beds are planted with flowering annuals and perennials which bloom at different periods during the year. By choosing carefully initially, and by caring for the flowers thereafter, the blooms will overlap each other, so that there will never be a period when an old bloom disappears but that a new one will start to show its colour.
Preparing the soil for flower beds or borders requires greater care than planting a lawn. For one thing, digging must be deeper. It is not too much to dig the bed 2 feet deep, although 1 1/2 feet is suitable.
It is, of course, possible to grow flowers in a shallower bed than this, but the deeper you dig, the better your production will be. All heavy lumps should be broken up. It is a good idea to spread some sand, cinders or ashes in the bottom soil to break it up.
Also, you might work manure, well-rotted compost, grass clippings or peat moss into the bottom. Do not firm the bottom soil down, but let it settle naturally.
Good loam should be used for the topsoil ? e.g., well-rotted manure, humus, peat moss, well-sifted leaf mould or heavy sand. Wood ashes are fine for spring, and lime may be used for loosening the soil.
You might think about the character of your soil and consider the particular fertilizer which contains the elements your soil needs most. Should you use manure, be careful not to let it touch the roots of plants.
The problems of colour should be kept in mind when planning flower borders and beds, so that while there is sufficient contrast in texture and colour of the flowers, there is at the same time an attractive blending.
A plan for a bed of annuals, for example, might be designed to stress zinnias, with contrast provided by such softer flowers as chrysanthemum, scabiosa, nasturtium, cosmos and candytuft. The situation of the flower bed is important.
Ideally, it should be close to the house, facing south or southwest. Any location that gets good sun, however, will produce well.
The border should be located away from trees or shrubs. These plants absorb more than their share of moisture and nutrients from the soil and, because of their strength, can overpower the more delicate flowering plants.
A good background such as a stone wall or a fence adds to the beauty of a flower bed or border, and evergreen shrubs make a pleasing backdrop. Edgings need not be restricted, as they so often are, to one colour (e.g., the white of alyssum).
Coral bells, whose lovely foliage makes a handsome edge, are an all-season flowering plant, and they provide unusual cut flowers. Baby pansies, violas, portulaca, ageratum, dwarf double nasturtium and dwarf marigolds are multi-coloured flowers.
Both Gregg Hall & Hege Crowton are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Gregg Hall has sinced written about articles on various topics from Lingerie, Desserts and Mortgage. Gregg Hall is a business consultant and author for many online and offline businesses and lives in Navarre Florida. Get at. Gregg Hall's top article generates over 3350000 views. to your Favourites.
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