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Beautiful Flower Landscapes
Color-Themed Flower Gardens
Pretty and practical, flowering plants offer rainbows of color suitable for any style garden or home landscape or special occasion.
A favorite for many are color-themed gardens. Flowers used in a painterly way bloom in a brilliant range of colors from orange daylilies to blue violet sage and yellow green hellebore to rich scarlet lobelia.
Gardens with color as their major design element may be monochromatic and feature massed plantings of one color. Such gardens achieve their pleasing effect with flowers in several ways:
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- Flowers that are all the same color,
- Flowers that have ranges of hues within a single color, or
- Multihued flowers—featuring the same color in a range of light to dark tones.
Other Options
Another option is to plant flowers with complementary and contrasting shades [see How to Use a Color Wheel demonstration].
In either case, choose your flowering plants’ foliage to accent or coordinate with their blooms and existing landscape colors. Match them to your home, or to the leaf and bloom colors of nearby landscape trees and shrubs.
The combination of unusual form and color make good choices for colorful plantings.
Bloom colors also allow you to play with depth perception to create make the smaller yards found in many recently-built subdivision homes appear larger.
For example, blue-tinged hues of violet, lavender, and pink seem to recede, while warm yellows, oranges, and reds seem nearer.
The opposite is also true. Planting a small terrace with a garden of pink, blue, and lavender blooms makes it look larger, while a border of gold and scarlet daylilies around a vast lawn makes the space seem cozier.
Take advantage of sunlit areas and spots of shade. Strong, contrasting colors make the most of sunny sites at midday. White is most visible as twilight turns to dusk, making white flowers ideal for gardens enjoyed in the evening.
Seasonal Successions of Blooms
Planning Seasons of Flowers
Plantings that rely on successions of flowers—blooms that appear one after another as the calendar pages turn—provide a changing garden show and mileposts to mark key moments in the gardening year.
Your challenge is to create continuous color through the wise selection of plants.
To create a garden with continuous color, organize plantings according to each plant’s bloom season. Each may last from a few weeks to several months.
To plan such successions of blooms, consider time as flowing backward. Begin choosing plants for the end of the season—the period from the heat of August until the first frosts—and work backwards one planting at a time through summer until you reach spring.
Allow time for sprouting, blooming, and entering into dormancy. Some blooms are lovely in their dried state, such as strawflowers. Others bear attractive seed, such as ornamental onion.
Remember these bonus seed heads as you plan your succession. They’ll serve as food for birds in early winter, after providing visual interest all through autumn.
As you choose plants, select one or two species that will highlight each season or month: early spring, spring, early summer, summer, and autumn.
Those who garden in mild-climates may choose some hardy plants to bloom throughout winter, while those growing flowers in tropical areas should plan the entire year.
With masses of blooming plants attracting attention in a series of changing flowers, other plants sprouting or fading becomes background foliage to the ones in flower.
Remember: where is as important as when. Create a series of focal points at various beds or borders in your garden.
Try to plant special groups of flowers to bloom when you are most likely to use that area of your yard. Don’t forget container gardens for the decks, patios, and entryways[see: Flowers in Containers].
Step-By-Step Instructions
Artist’s color wheels are valuable when deciding which colors, tones, and hues to choose when picking flowers for containers and for beds and borders in home landscapes.
Gather your color wheel, visit a garden center with plants in nursery containers, and follow these simple steps:
How to Use a Color Wheel
Choose tones from any one-third division of the color palette—here yellow to red strawflowers—to ensure that your flower planting will have a pleasing array of blooms.
For more striking color, choose opposites across the wheel. To lighten or darken the floral display, choose lighter or darker hues of each color.
Here, primary red and yellow contrast with violet-blue to create drama and depth.
Arrange the plants in the container or bed, still in their store containers, until you achieve a pleasing arrangement you like.
Remove each plant in sequence from its container for planting.
Plant the container or bed with flowers in the same spots as they were arranged.
This arrangement features tall red snapdragons surrounded by yellow pansies, which contrast with the violet-blue pansies.