The Flower Garden
When you think of the garden it is typically of the flower garden. After all flowers are essential to the beauty and appeal of the basic garden. Foliage and unusual fruits don’t fill the void alone.
When planning your flower garden its best to sit down with a pencil and paper in order to create the basic layout of the garden. This will help to prevent mistakes.
The essential part of a flower garden is the flowering plants so you want to place the garden to show off the plants in the best possible manner and to help them receive the nutrients, water and light that they need to be the best darn flowers they can be. A good flower bed will be six to eight feet deep. Plant the flowers in these beds in shallow groups that are wider than they are deep so the flowers are better displayed.
The best site will be away from other larger plants such as shrubs or trees. The roots of these plants will seek out the food and moisture that you give your flower beds, robbing them of what they need to grow. If possible place the bed against a house or building. There is less chance of nutrient robbing roots and hopefully your house will provide a nice background to help show off the flowers.
When arranging your plants in the flower beds try not to make them look too uniform. This isn’t militaristic gardening, its artistic gardening. Instead of planting in rows try putting clumps of flowers near clumps of other types of flowers. You’ll want the taller plants to be at the back of the bed to show them off and keep them from blocking your view of the smaller plants.
Work to maintain your garden with some constant attention, but not too constant. Too much watering and love may kill the plants. You may have some perennials in your garden that have been around for a few years. Note if you can that the perennial tends to send out new growth in ever widening ring in search of food. In the center of this ring the old growth tends to die out leaving a circle with dead foliage in the center. The best way to deal with this is to dig up the perennial every three to four years and divide it up into smaller sections to be planted in different areas of the garden.
A good time of year to work on rearranging your garden is often September or October. However if you don’t wish to work on the garden this time of year you can arrange some types of plants in early spring. The basic point is to try and work on the garden well before or after the plants are going to bloom.
When picking out plants for the garden pay careful attention to whether they are annuals, biennials, or perennials. You can often be confused by plants in the garden that seem to disappear or suddenly change color when you aren’t aware of their nature. Biennials only last two years and may be mistaken for a perennial which can lead to consternation the third year when a plant fails to appear. Annuals tend to reseed themselves and their seedlings can come back in different colors than the parent plant. This can also happen when a perennial or biennial dies for some reason and its progeny carry on in its place.
Popular plants for the garden are; Chrysanthemums for their hardiness and prolific blooms, Oriental Poppies are popular as somewhat exotic plants whose blooms come in a rainbow of colors these days, Cornflower is a hardy annual with lots of flowers that range in color from white to blue to pink, Phlox is a tall flowering plant with beautiful colored flowers and it’s a perennial, and Snap Dragons as they come in a range of colors and have unusually shaped flowers for which they are named.