Landscaping Your Flowering Plants

Posted by Ena Clewes
May 2nd, 2008
Filed in Garden Maintenance
Tags: English Garden, flowers, garden, garden planning, hostas, manure, shade

To grow great-looking, healthy blooms, take a look at your garden soil. Flowers grown in poor soil make for sad plants. Always have a little pile of composted manure in some outer corner. This is very convenient when you may be planting just a few plants at a time. A pile of manure is priceless when it comes to soil improvement. Use an inch of this black gold as mulch around your flowers each year and watch them flourish.

A Deeper Shade of Blues …

Landscape gardeners use warm colors – red, orange,and yellow – to make objects look as though they are coming forward. They also use cool colors – blue and violet – to suggest distance. You can create the same effect in your flower beds. Purple of a rich bluish hue is one of the colors which bind instead of separate, and purple becomes an excellent focal color in the garden.Gray-leaved plants create a quiet tone which seems to soothe all the conflicting elements of the garden, and creates a tranquil unity and accord. Blue lyme grass is one of the best gray-leaved plants for the border, even though its leaves are usually described as blue. Whether you see it as blue or gray, this grass is an excellent ornamental that’s hardy from Zones 4-10. It is not fussy about soil and will grow in either sun or light shade.

A garden filled with shades of green can be extremely attractive, if you use a variety of plants and shapes to add interest. Try growing Virginia creeper, Ostrich fern, Solomon’s seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit, Hostas, and Lady’s mantle. It is said that green is the last color to be appreciated in a garden, but even the Japanese, who are so sensitive to color, use many green leaves in their flower art.

A quote from Loring Underwood in A Garden Diary and Country Home Guide, 1908, reads:

Did you ever think how monotonous and gaudy flowers would seem without green foliage to set off their beauty? Have all the green things you can in the garden, particularly at the back of flower beds and borders, and take as much pains in protecting foliage of plants from insects as you do flowers.

Contrasting Colors to Cure Your Garden Doldrums

A white border can be a delight in any garden, especially in the evening, and also in the daytime. A sprinkling of white in any flower bed is what the diamond is in the mineral world. If you take a tall jar and fill it with water, add some tall blue flower, (Delphinium) and then add some white Canterbury bells, you will be pleasantly surprised at how the colors just spring out when the white is added. If you want to harmonize any two colors together, just add white.

There are many gardeners who like the “one-color” garden, but they often seem to be monotonous in effect. They are seldom truly harmonious and fail to give the pleasure that is often derived from a garden full of color. In many ways too, the lack of color can exclude many types of wonderful flowers that cannot play a part in such a color scheme. Think of all the pinks, blue and yellows that give such satisfaction to a color palette.

That being said, the joy of gardening is that we can all be free to express ourselves, be whimsical, ardent and most of all enjoy the fruits of our labor!