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Flowers for Home Gardens
In This Section
Throughout this section, you’ll find inspiration and directions for planning beautiful gardens for your home with flowering plants, including:
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- How seasonal color and flowering plants are used in home landscapes.
- Where and when flowers grow in home landscapes and gardens.
- How to mix annual and perennial flowers in beds and borders with bulbs for long-season beauty.
- Where to use containers of individual or mixed flower species outdoors.
- Where to get ideas for planting your own flower garden.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions about subjects related to landscaping and decorating with flowers under each of the following titles:
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- Growing a Flower Garden
- Roles Flowers Play in Gardens
- Gaining Inspiration for Your Garden
- The Promise of Flowers
- The Seasons of Flowers
- Selecting Flowers for Your Garden
- Growing a Flower Garden
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Growing a Flower Garden
Find ideas and inspiration to turn your yard and landscape into a colorful showplace filled with flowers all season long.
Flowers are showstoppers in every garden.
Their blooms appear in ever-changing colors and hues on plants low, mid-height, and tall. Some trail or nod, others spike towers of color.
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The show changes as the calendar pages turn and the gardening season progresses. Each month has a different showcase for your landscape.
Roles Flowers Play in Gardens
From towering sunflowers to diminutive daisies, annuals, perennials, and bulbs bloom in a breathtaking array of forms and color shades.
They may be tiny or rangy, their textures lacy, velvety, or waxy, and they may stand in solitary elegance or form huge, showy clusters.
Flowers are garden stars in their own right, but some are content to play supporting roles to featured shrubs and trees.
Carefully selected, they will perform in frost or near-searing heat, sun or shade—even in infertile soil—from desert and tropical regions to the fringes of the arctic.
It’s no wonder annuals are such crowd pleasers—and what diverse crowds they can please.
Filling your yard’s beds and borders with color is as easy as stopping by your nearby garden store, gathering an armful of annual or perennial bedding plants in containers, and dropping them into the soil. These color plants are economical, and success is easily replicated in seasons to come.
Gaining Inspiration for Your Garden
Flowers are beloved by all for their bewitching fragrances, their ability to attract birds and butterflies into a yard, or simply for their reliability and the favorable comments they attract from passersby.
In this section, you’ll see dozens of inspirational examples flowers at work in real home landscapes, container gardens, mixed-plantings, beds, islands, and borders.
Get the ideas you need to create the flower garden you seek, regardless of your experience or where you live.
The Promise of Flowers
Annuals and perennials are dazzlers in every home flower garden.
They bloom in every color, size, and shape, from blue sentinels of Larkspur to the bold-red statement of Astilbe. Annuals may come and go, but perennials put on a show of garden color that turns more lush and beautiful each passing year.
The Seasons of Flowers
Flowers mark the seasons of the year, heralding spring, summer, and autumn—much as special holidays mark the calendar.
Annuals and tender perennials die, while hardy herbaceous perennials go dormant and lose their leaves in winter. Others may remain as low tufts of foliage marking time until the next season.
In areas of mild winter climates, some flowering perennials are fully evergreen.
Even fancy, hybridized versions of most annuals and perennials are descendants of hardy wildflowers. Their parents grew wild in meadows, mountains, swamps, and woodlands.
Selecting Flowers for Your Garden
Take advantage of this heritage and diversity. Since the flowers you plant come from many different environments, there are fancy and traditional flowering annuals and perennials to suit nearly every garden need.
Most flower gardeners freely mix annuals with their perennial plants. Because perennials are permanent plants, they are practical and economical.
Using annuals as fillers relieves monotony, changes the bed’s look, and refreshes your flower garden without the effort and expense of replanting everything each season.
Pretty and practical, flowers offer a rainbow of color for any style garden.
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