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Growing Flowers at Home
In This Section
In this section, you’ll find discussions, explanations, and directions for planning beautiful flower gardens, including:
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- Botanical facts and general descriptions of the major types of flowering plants grown in home gardens.
- Where to begin in planning home landscapes and gardens.
- Inspiration and uses of flowers grown in home flower beds and flower gardens.
- How bulbs differ from other plants and how to use them to grow beautiful flowers in your garden and indoors.
- How flowers in containers add variety and expand the range of flower gardening activities and gardens.
- Indoor uses of bulbs for flower or foliage houseplants and as decorative displays inside your home.
- How to consider sites for flower gardens and weigh the importance of climate, sunlight, wind exposure, and other factors that affect how flowers grow.
- Five popular garden building and construction projects you can do yourself to make your yard more beautiful.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions of the following subjects beneath the titles shown:
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- About the Flower Gardening Section
- About the Plants We Call Flowers
- Annuals and Tender Perennials
- Perennials and Biennials
- Bulbs and Bulbous Plants
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About the Flower Gardening Section
This is your gateway to growing and enjoying flowers at home, indoors and out. Enter our world of flower gardening and explore and learn about how to plant and grow beautiful flowers at home in your yard or in containers.
Find inspiration and ideas, learn flower and bulb basics, and plan your plantings to beautify your yard while making your landscape’s care both quick and easy.
We’ll start by sharing some examples of how others use flowers in home gardens and as houseplants. You’ll find other ideas of how you might use flowers in your home and garden by looking online, in periodicals, and in books.
From there, we’ll explain and show how to plan a flower garden, plant flowers and flower beds, care for flowers, and provide a guide with hundreds of choices of the most commonly planted flowers for home gardens and landscapes.
But first, let’s start with the basics: What, exactly, are these special flowering plants and bulbs?
About the Plants We Call Flowers
Home flower gardeners grow three types of flowering and foliage plants for their beauty and fragrance: annuals and tender perennials, hardy perennials, and an assortment of plants called bulbs.
Annuals and Tender Perennials
Annuals and Tender Perennials. Annual plants and tender perennials are showstoppers in every garden.
True annuals are plants that, if given time and good weather conditions, sprout, grow, form flowers, and develop seed in a single season, then die. A new generation grows from their seed the following year.
Tender perennial plants would live to grow year after year in mild-winter or subtropical climates. They cannot survive sustained cold temperatures.
Along with the true annuals, these tender perennials frequently are planted as nursery starts in cold-winter regions. They’re used by gardeners as though they were annual flowers, grown to enjoy for a single garden season, then planted anew the next year.
From towering sunflowers to diminutive pansies, both annuals and tender perennials bloom in a breathtaking array of hues, flower forms, alluring scents, and sizes.
Some annuals are climbing vines that cascade over walls and arbors. Others sit demurely at the edge of a border, while still more annual plants stand erect and tall beside walls or structures.
You’ll soon be able to learn more about each of more than 80 annuals, to be found in our coming Annuals guide. You’ll soon recognize each of the flowers special qualities and will plant them to your advantage [see: Flower Facts and Bulb Basics].
Perennials and Biennials
Perennials and Biennials. True perennial plants repeat their growth and reproduction cycles year after year. While many are long-lived, some are produce well for a few years, then lose vigor and die.
Most gardeners also include biennial plants in the perennial group.
Many gardeners use perennials as the foundation plants for their flowering landscapes and beds.
Perennials bloom in every color, size, and shape, from the blue sentinels of delphinium to the bold statement of a red-hot poker.
Perennials are stars at producing showy garden flowers and foliage that become more lush and beautiful with each passing year.
Trained horticulturists classify the perennials as plants with fibrous roots that grow and bloom for more than two years, while biennials complete their life cycle in two years.
While some are shrubby in their growth habit, all biennials and perennials differ from shrubs such as azalea—that also grow and bloom repeatedly—because they lack the shrubs’ woody stems.
Gardeners commonly use some annuals, biennials, bulbs, and shrubs to perform virtually the same role as perennials in their landscape gardens.
For this reason, our Perennials plant guide includes some plants that academics or botanists might otherwise place in some other plant category. Rest assured that the plants listed here are well worth your consideration as you choose long-lasting additions to beautify your garden.
Learn more about these differences so you can recognize the pros and cons of each plant you are considering [see: Flower Facts and Bulb Basics].
Bulbs
Bulbs and Bulbous Plants. Most plants called bulbs include plants in one of the five major categories of bulbous plants: true bulbs, corms, rhizomes, tubers, or tuberous roots.
A few “bulbs” are actually pseudobulbs—rooted plants that mimic true bulbs or tubers—by producing foliage and flowers, then going dormant to survive long dry spells, and reviving when rains renew their growth.
Another way of looking at bulbs is to separate them by their season of bloom. Many prefer to refer to “spring bulbs,” “summer bulbs,” and “autumn” or “winter” bulbs. It’s a good way to help choose bulbs and plan for seasonal color in your yard [see: Bulbs and Seasons of Bloom].
Home gardeners plant bulbs outdoors, of course [see: Bulbs in Home Landscapes]. It’s not, however, their only use.
These wonderful plants also make great houseplants and you’ll find many ways to trick them into producing showy blooms at any time of the year to beautify your home [see: Bulbs Indoors and Forcing Bulbs].
To help you in your plans, you’ll also find some useful tips about various regions of the United States and when you should plant your bulbs [see: Regional Tips for Bulbs].
Start learning about how the categories of bulbous plants differ so you can recognize each type and plant those that will perform best in your garden and on your landscape site. [see: Bulb Basics].
Outdoors in the landscape, bulbs typically provide four different design options for home gardens:
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- Formal Plantings
- Informal Plantings
- Natural and “Naturalized” Plantings
- Bed and Border Plantings
- Mixed Plantings
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Indoors, there’s three ways bulbs brighten homes:
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- Bulbs in Containers
- Forced Bulb Blooms
- Bulbs as Foliage Houseplants
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Whether to choose a formal or informal planting style is a matter of choice for each individual. The decision involves matching bulb plantings to overall design and decor choices used throughout the yard and home.
At the opposite end of the scale are naturalized bulb plantings that mimic in our mind’s eye how a natural setting might appear: a clump of flowers here, a solo plant there, turf with bulbs flowering through the green grass, or a field of spring bulbs blooming beneath trees just coming into leaf.
Some gardeners prefer to mass their bulbs in beds or borders, while others like to mix bulbs, annual and perennial flowers, shrubs, and trees.
Gain inspiration and learn more about all your bulb-planting options by exploring these links:
> Next: Flower Facts and Bulb Basics