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Flower Planting Basics
In This Section
In this section, you’ll find discussions, explanations, directions and step-by-step demonstrations for planting flowers, including:
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- How to determine quality of seed and transplant flower starts while choosing plants for your garden.
- How to judge and select the healthiest plants available for planting.
- How to judge and choose healthy bulbs that will thrive in your garden.
- Steps and preparations needed to plant bulbs.
On This Page
Here, you’ll find discussions of the following subjects on preparing to plant flowers beneath each of the following titles:
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- Planting a Flower Garden
- Designing a Flower Garden
Planting a Flower Garden
Knowing how to plant flowers raised from seed, bulbs, or as transplants is the most enjoyable part of flower gardening.
This section helps you select quality seed and bulbs or strong and healthy flowering plants. It shows you in detail how to properly plant each of them correctly into the landscape or containers.
Seeds are available in winter and spring for all annuals and for some biennial and tender perennial flowering plants. Local nurseries and garden specialty stores begin stocking transplants in containers as soon as temperatures are warm enough to begin planting in each region.
The choice of raising annual and perennial flowers from seed or transplants depends on which plants you choose for your yard, the length of your growing season, and your budget.
All bulbs are planted either from nursery-grown bulbs, rhizomes, tubers, or tuberous-rooted stock.
Take a moment to prepare before you begin. Make an informed decision on which seed, bulbs, or transplants to buy [see: Choosing Seed or Transplants].
Next, make sure that the plants you choose for your flower garden are the best quality available. While flowers and bulbs are very forgiving, avoid any that are damaged, show signs of weeds, pests, and diseases, and are vigorous [see: Selecting Healthy Plants and Choosing Healthy Bulbs].
There are other plant choice options, as well. They depend on your flower garden plan and how your plantings are to be structured.
When will your bed, border, or container bloom? Will it be beautiful for a single month or two of the season, or will you grow a succession of flowers to have different flowers as stars from spring to autumn? The answer lies timing and understanding both the planting time and the season of bloom of each flower you choose [see: Planting Flower Successions and Bulb Planting Seasons].
Will you plant outdoors or for indoors, and will your flowers grow in the ground or in containers? Each requires different considerations [see: Planting Flowers Outdoors and Planting Flowers in Containers] or the similar information available for bulbs.
Finally, before you begin, take a moment to learn what care your flowers will need over the first few weeks after planting [see: After-Planting Care].
Designing a Flower Garden
The variety and diversity of annuals, perennials, and bulbs make them a perfect choice for adding flowers to any area of your landscape, patio, or deck.
Their array of colors, shapes, and sizes will produce just about any garden design. To have a beautiful garden, start with a color plan before you plant. Based your design on these few simple design tips.
You’ll need some basic understanding of color schemes, combining different shapes and textures, and using flowering plants for both their blooms and their foliage. If in doubt about color choices, ask the staff at your garden center for assistance and consider their recommendations.
Pick flowers that will complement your nearby landscape and architectural features. When deciding on color, keep in mind the location of the plants in your garden.
Pastels such as pale-lemon tints appear to best advantage during the morning light, perfect for a view from a kitchen breakfast area.
The soft pastel colors appear faded during in the brightest times of the day. Consider instead a bold-colored planting of flowers with intense primary colors. They’re fitting for views into the backyard outside a family room, or for a front yard.
Use richer and brighter colored flowers for backgrounds of edgings and borders, since warm, bright colors seem to stand out in the landscape while pale or cool ones appear to recede.
Soften the contrast of a planting by adding some white or cream-colored flowers.
If you’re among those who like white flowers grouped alone, grow a bed of white cosmos, petunias, and dahlias. When viewed at evening or by moonlight, all-white gardens fairly seem to glow in the dusk.