Everyone’s Favorite Flower Gardens
Choosing Your Flower Garden
Everyone has one or more favorite styles of flower garden. Here are examples of some inspiring flower landscapes to plant in your own yard.
Formal or informal? Natural or carefully designed? Sunny and bright or shady and cool? All are good choices for the best home flower landscapes. In the end—as always—it all comes down to your personal taste and style.
Certain types of flower gardens are popular year after year. Others are fads that last a few seasons, then fade quietly away.
It’s normal to personalize some features of your home, and tailoring a garden to match your personality and locale is appropriate and fun.
For beginning gardeners with an empty yard, bed, or container, we recommend choosing one of the classics shown and discussed here.
Those who are more experienced, or gardeners who’ve inherited a landscape by moving into a new home, may want to change things up a bit.
The Classic English Border
Year after years, a favorite of most flower gardeners is the so-called English border. They use annuals, perennials—even bulbs—to stunning effect.
If your taste is informal yet harken to an earlier era, or if you’re simply a romantic, English border style flower landscapes are for you.
They’re surprisingly recent, if you consider 120 years a short time.
First developed by landscape designers in Great Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, these border gardens were an antidote to the rigidly formal garden styles that they replaced.
The English border looks just right next to a house or cottage that’s small, quaint, or English tudor or Craftsman in its design.
The planting has a natural, even playful, look, achieved by combining and juxtaposing a profusion of flowers with different colors, shapes, textures, and heights.
Within this natural appearance, however, is a subtle design structure: low plants are in front, medium-size plants behind them, and tall plants in the back.
Flowers with tall spikes of clustered flowers complement mounded and rounded plantings. Colors are equally subtle, tending more toward the pastel hues rather than the primary or fluorescent colors.
In Great Britain, border plantings comprise cool-weather annuals and perennials. These flowers barely tolerate summer heat, yet that’s what’s found in large areas of the United States much above U.S.D.A. Plant Hardiness Zone 8 [see: Plant Hardiness and Climate].
English borders are best when you live in an area with long, cool summers—or consider a springtime English border that will be replanted as the season progresses.
Choose tall larkspur in the back row, old-fashioned mallow at the mid-border, behind poppies and an edging of sweet William. Add perennials if your climate tolerates a season-long planting.
Another option is a flower garden themed around one or two colors. Plant, for example, cream- and raspberry-colored pansies, pink globe candytuft, pink and peach Iceland poppies, pink flowering flax, and pink and white foxglove or Dutchman’s breeches.
If you garden in a mild-winter climate, plant your cool-weather annuals along with your perennials in autumn for a winter bloom.
Two last options, for warm-summer climates, are English borders with heat-loving annuals such as spider flower in the back row, globe amaranth in the mid-border, and pansies in the front.
Or, start instead with a backdrop of Mexican sunflowers. They will create a 5–7-foot-high (1.5–2.1-m) background hedge, towering over the rest of your plantings, and their deep-green leaves harmonize beautifully with mid-border drifts of gold coreopsis.
Annual and perennial flowerers planted in this enduring style will transport you and your home into the English countryside.
Casual and Natural Flower Gardens
The term “natural garden” has come to mean different things and embraces several categories of flower gardens.
A garden can be natural in style, natural in the selection of plants, or natural in maintenance. Their style may evoke natural settings from woodlands and seashores to prairies and meadows, even deserts.
All are lovely floral additions to home landscapes, and they have the bonus benefit of providing habitat to wildlife, birds, and pollinating insects.
Natural gardens are casual and asymmetrical; plants are set out in apparently random masses without apparent order and form.
Natural Style
Many annuals, perennials, and grasses have informal looks, making them appropriate for natural-style gardens.
Structures and accents are informal, often also using materials found in the surrounding area. These natural styles are ideal for more than country gardens—they blend perfectly into city and suburbs locations, too.
Native Plants
Gardens featuring only regionally indigenous flowering plants and grasses are beautiful. They are easy to maintain, require less care, and are great for attracting birds and butterflies.
Some natural gardens have strict parameters of native-only plants, while others include plants that, while well adapted to the climate and soil, are native to similar settings found in other regions around the world.
It’s perfectly reasonable to include flowers from the plains of South Africa or pampas of Chile in an American natural garden located in the southwest.
Environmentally Friendly
Gardeners maintain these special natural gardens with an eye to organic remedies and ecology. Environmentally friendly gardeners improve the soil. They choose organic compost and natural fertilizers in preference to synthetic options. They learn about natural remedies for pests and diseases. Their natural gardens are healthy for birds, bees, butterflies, children, and pets.
Most perennials are naturally sturdy and pest resistant, making them good selections for such gardens.
Any style garden can be maintained in accordance with these principles, whether it’s natural in style or uses native plants.
If you are intrigued by natural gardens, remember that any landscape can adapt to a natural look.
Study nearby wildlands around your home. Note their plant communities. Also focus on the light and moisture conditions where wildflowers and grasses flourish.
Armed with these clues, look for plants in our plant guide that play similar roles or visit native-plant nurseries and obtain the original for your home landscape.
Flower Borders and Beds
Flower gardening at its most glamorous, for many, represents the classic flowering border or bed.
Layered masses of blooming plants create a changing tapestry of shape and color. Gardeners carefully choreograph the colors, shades, tone, and hues of flowering plants.
Many beds and borders are planted with flower successions that progress throughout the growing season.
The art of the perennial border was brought to its pinnacle in the early years of the 20th century. Vast borders flanked rolling lawns at entrances to stately homes. They also required a small army of gardeners to tend them.
They are still widely grown in landscapes today, scaled a bit to better fit today’s typical homes with smaller lots.
A border is a planting area that is long and narrow, often viewed from a single side or an end.
Hedges, fences, your home, or other structures often back these borders.
By comparison, a bed is a planting area made to be viewed from more than one side, as in an island or peninsula flower bed.
Beds and borders can be formal—squares, rectangles, or circles—or informal—filled with free-form, curving shapes. Beds often include trees and shrubs, or stand alone in a turf-grass lawn.
Beds and borders both have other advantages.
Borders leave open space in the center of the landscape and soften the edges of buildings, fences, and walkways.
Beds, with two or more sides, are always on view from varied parts of the garden. They also allow sunlight and air to penetrate and circulate within the plantings, keeping them healthy.
Whichever appeals to you and fits your needs, a bed or border packed with flowers will be a focal point of your garden.
Many historic gardens are preserved and open to the public, through the Garden Conservancy in the United States and the National Trust in Britain.
Among the best places to see new perennial borders are botanical gardens. Many are within at most an hour’s drive of most of us, and they’re great spots to gain ideas for home landscape flower plantings.
Massed Plantings
Mass plantings are another way to make a colorful and dramatic perennial garden in you home landscape.
One-species plantings of flowers create what gardeners call massed plantings, a big flower show of colorful daisies, iris, oriental poppies, purple coneflower, or treasure flower.
Rather than look at individual blossoms, build arresting quilts of color in your beds and borders. Mass plantings are ideal for gardens in regions with short growing seasons and when plans include viewing at a special event.
Many commercial landscapers choose mass plantings to create striking beds in business and public parks. Try it for your home’s garden.
How does the show continue after the star species flowers begin to fade? Fortunately, there are available options that have worked for many gardeners.
Replanting is one option, but consider others first.
Plant early-blooming bearded irises, for example, along the edges of deep beds. Behind them, plant a late-season species such as hardy asters. The irises’ foliage will remain to creates a foreground frame for the taller asters in bloom behind them.
Another idea is to fill beds with spring-blooming bulbs. As their flower fade, plant the bed with your massed species. Between them plant summer-into-autumn-blooming annuals, bulbs, and perennials.
A useful tip: Always choose plants that need the same sun and water conditions.
For the maximum flowering period, select varieties of a single species that bloom in early season, at midseason, and also late in the season. That will lengthen the show far longer than planting all in one variety.
Hybridizers recently have been crossing and selecting for the ability to rebloom. There are daylilies and iris, for example, that bloom repeatedly until frost threatens. With these, even gardeners devoted to a single perennial species can enjoy a long season of beautiful color in their garden.
Flowers in Containers
Container gardening is another way to enjoy flowers at home. Growing flowers in pots, planters, and containers is especially popular for many with small-space yards, balconies or patios, and indoor gardens.
There are many reasons to grow flowers in containers.
It’s easy—you avoid digging and soil tests—just pour potting soil out of a bag.
Containers are perfect for difficult-to-plant places and areas with poor soil. In cold climates you can start tender annuals and perennials indoors and simply move them outdoors, returning them inside when cold hits.
Best of all, container plantings allow you to experiment with new arrangements, textures and color combinations.
Here’s a tip: big pots are nearly always better than small. If you use small pots, group them in odd-numbered assortments of 3, 5, or 7.
Mimic a lavish border or bouquet by selecting plants in these four categories:
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- Anchor plants: These are upright plants, 2–3 feet (60–90 cm) high, for the center or back of the pot.
- Fluffers: These are supporting players with small-scale leaves and flowers; plant them along the rim of the pot to hide bare soil and stems.
- Drapers: These plants spill over the pot’s edge, softening the contrast between decorative containers and the plants’ foliage.
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