> Next: Landscapes: Where to Start
How to Design Landscapes
and Flower Gardens
How to measure beds in a home landscape to draw a garden site plan.
In This Section
In this section, you’ll find discussions, explanations, and directions for planning beautiful flower gardens and example plans and plant lists for the most popular types of flowerbeds, including:
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- How to measure, draw, and design a flower bed in a home landscape.
- Choices and options for flower beds in home landscapes and gardens.
- Where to start in the planning process and how to approach both existing and new flower beds.
- How to draw a landscape plan and perspective drawings.
- Complete plans for four flower-bed plantings with diagrams, plant materials lists, and spacing recommendations.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions of the following subjects beneath each of the following titles:
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- Designing a Perfect Flower Garden
- Getting Started
- Start Small
- Choose the Right Flowering Plants
- Unity and Scale
- Your Goal
- Shape and Form
- Two Plans: Layout and Perspective
- Measuring
- Planning and Plant-Choice Tips
- Choose an Approach
- Color and Surprise
- Using Color in Garden Plans
- Fragrance and Texture
- Expand Your Palette to Other Senses
Designing a Perfect Flower Garden
Do you want to learn how to get ideas, design a perfect landscape or flower garden yourself, and make easy-to-follow planting plans in a few simple steps?
Many homeowners want to make their yards more beautiful with flowers, but wonder where to start. Rest assured. Here’s how landscape design professionals begin when they start to design a new flowering landscape.
Getting Started
Think of your landscape as a blank canvas on which you are going to explore and fashion a garden you’ll love.
For clarity’s sake, we’ll show you the old-fashioned way that landscape designers worked. They produced sketches, rather than making renderings on a computer or tablet by using landscape design software.
The garden plan you’ll develop will begin with sketches and ideas. You’ll experiment with elements until you find a few you love, those that suit your personal dreams and flair.
In this section, you’ll also find a selection of complete flower-bed design plans you can follow and plant in your own garden or yard.
Let’s get started.
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Start Small
If in doubt or when trying to design a flower garden for the first time, start small. It’s easier to hone your design skills on the plan for a single garden feature than for a whole landscape.
Design a single flower bed or border before trying larger projects. Working on a compact project helps to gain confidence and receive the rewards of quick results by which you’ll be able to measure your success.
In this section, you’ll find a number of example plans for individual beds, borders, and landscape groups.
Depending on your comfort level, follow them exactly or just use them as starting points to customize your own designs [See: A Corner Flower Bed Plan, A Layered Island Flower Bed Plan, An English Border Flower Bed Plan, and A Formal Mixed-Flower Bed Plan].
Choose the Right Flowering Plants
When designing most successful flower gardens, beds, or smaller plantings, think first in terms of plant communities.
Plan to plant only flowering annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees that are a good match for your home’s climate, exposure, soil, and site.
You’ll find all these important factors are listed for each plant included in our plant guides.
- Choose plants that are hardy for your U.S.D.A. plant hardiness zone and the microclimates found in your yard.
- Pick plants that grow best in soils like yours, even if you plan to amend and add fertilizers.
Observe through the day how the sun falls on your site, remembering that the shadows during winter months are longer than those of midsummer.
Unity and Scale
Producing a landscape with unity—harmony and fit—is at the heart of garden design.
Strive to have unison between all the elements you include in your garden plan. Weigh how they fit with other features, fences, walls, paving, plants, structures, and changes in the level of the site.
Work with existing structures and landscape elements. Closely study those you already have, then enhance them with plants and new elements to match.
Consider adding materials—brick or pavers, concrete, house siding and finishes, turf grass lawns, and so on—that repeat existing elements’ textures or colors.
Remember that plants in containers or grown up trellises also alter the look and feel of structures and walls.
Your Goal
The goal is to make all the structural elements in your site blend together. They’ll produce a background setting that contributes quietly to the new flower garden.
Yet another important design element for consideration is scale—the size relationship between objects and plants.
You should adjust the size of your plants and flowers as needed so they remain in proportion to their neighboring plants and surroundings. Always strive to match or complement the size of your house, existing landscape trees, and shrubs.
Remember density of foliage and structure of branches also play roles.
An open dogwood tree allows glimpses of the landscape beyond it. A pine, spruce, or fir conifer, by contrast, is like a solid wall, so use them as background elements behind a foreground of new plantings, or as a solo specimen planting called an accent.
A similar comparison applies to lattice-work fences instead of solid fences and trellises or walls in your yard.
Shape and Form
Plants have forms that range from upright and lofty to sprawling or dangling. Flowering ground covers are living carpets in the garden room you design, just as shrubs and trees form their walls.
Regular spacing feels formal, while group plantings and irregular spacing appears more natural and casual.
Landscape designers often perform magic by choosing just the right plants. Do what they do. Designers weigh each species or cultivar’s specific growth habits. In short, they go beyond color, foliage texture, or height.
Landscape architects often see flowers and other plants as columns, spikes, mounds, and geometric shapes first. Only later do they consider specific selections by their color and height.
Create visual interest in your garden plan by repeating or contrasting these shapes and forms.
Use plants of different colors, foliage patterns, and groupings that add visual interest to your landscape, bed, or border.
Two Plans: Layout and Perspective
The end goal of all this thinking, choosing, sketching, erasing, and repeat trials will be two final plans [See: Drawing a Landscape Plan].
Both of these garden plans will be scale diagrams—accurate drawings scale to measurements you’ll take in your landscaped yard or garden site—you’ll use for installing and planting your flower garden.
The first will be a birds-eye view of the garden from overhead—a chart or layout diagram, in designer’s terms.
The other plan will capture how the garden will look to you after it has been planted and is grown in. It views the landscape as if you were standing and looking at it from a short distance away, and is called a perspective or an elevation drawing.
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Measuring
Just two things must be done so you draw these landscape plans accurately: you must take careful measurements and transfer those measurements to paper so they are easily consulted when you draft your plan.
You may find it helpful during the drawing step to take photographs of your existing site. You’ll need clear photographs in good light of various aspects of your yard—such as the view you see from the street, the view from the back door looking out, or the view from the driveway.
Remember that bystanders will view your landscape from a variety of angles as they approach, reach the midpoint, and then move away from it. Those on paths within the yard’s boundaries will have even more perspectives to view.
Similarly, you’ll see your yard from indoors, looking through one or more windows or doorways. Consider all these angles as you photograph or sketch how you want your yard to look after planting.
Enlarge the photographs on a photocopier, then draw on the photocopies with colored pencils or use tracing paper overlays, trying out your different planting ideas.
The beauty of using this approach is that you’ll see exactly what a columnar evergreen would look like at the corner of your house, as opposed to a rounded shrub, without every buying a shrub or taking a shovel into your hands.
Planning and Plant-Choice Tips
Choose an Approach
Many of the plans, pictures, illustrations, and descriptions found elsewhere in this section will provide helpful ideas and inspiration for designing your own flower garden.
Mix several garden styles for an eclectic and unique flower garden, or follow the planting and design suggestions more closely.
As another option, plant a garden true to a geometric pattern or an established planting plan, but substitute the suggested plants with flowering annuals, perennials, shrubs, and trees that grow better in your own region or have a different color scheme.
It’s your garden, and it’s all up to you and your taste.
Color and Surprise
Using Color in Garden Plans
The wide array of flower colors, tints, hues, and tones is astounding. They give your tremendous latitude for choosing a color scheme for your flower garden.
Light up a corner border by mixing and matching contrasting colors, such as raspberry with orange. Create a stately and elegant feel with a monochromatic grouping of flowers in a single hue. Go formal with paired complementary colors, such as blue and gold.
Top a hanging planter with mounding yellow nasturtiums over dangling, electric-blue petunias.
Using fresh color choices, your flower garden, bed, or border never becomes boring. The color options for your landscape are virtually endless.
Fragrance and Texture
Expand Your Palette to Other Senses
Think like many landscape designers, and go beyond the sense of sight to consider the smell and feel of your future flower garden.
Plant fragrant flowers near your front-entry walkway or kitchen door so you can enjoy heady aromas as you pass by your garden, but also remember that many herbs also emit lovely scents. Even ground-cover plantings that tolerate light traffic may emit fragrances when they are crushed underfoot, such as blue-flowered, low-growing thyme.
Treasure other flowers for the unique texture of their foliage, from lacy ferns to bristly rosemary sprigs. Plants with unusual colors or variegated leaves are also popular.
Many flower gardeners choose include ornamental kale in their plantings, especially in autumn.
Consider all your senses when planting. Invite a touch, a feel, or a closer and more intimate look that adds interest to your flower garden or landscape.
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