What Kind of Flowers Are Good to Grow in a Child's Garden?

Edible Petals

• Children experience life with all their senses. By creating a bed of edible flowers, your child can see, smell, touch and taste nature's beauty. Flowers are fantastic in soup, salad and desserts, and they're packed with all kinds of vitamins. Roses, for example, offer more vitamin C than oranges. Some of the more popular edible flowers for inclusion in your child's garden include chamomile, which is naturally sweet and makes a great bedtime tea; lavender, from which you can make a dream pillow with your child; and nasturtium, whose petals could replace the pepperoni on his next pizza.

Butterfly-Attracting Flowers

• Flowers high in nectar attract butterflies and provide your child with hours of viewing pleasure. Some butterfly-drawing blossoms include snapdragon, aster, shasta daisy, purple coneflowers, marigold and zinnia. To create a butterfly garden you also need to give the caterpillars and butterflies alike wind shelters, shallow pools of water and sunning rocks.

  Flowering herbs are one choice for your butterfly borders, which also provides you with culinary supplies. Nasturtium and painted ladies make sound options too, as caterpillars like to attach their cocoons to them. At this stage your child can begin watching for the hatching of baby butterflies.

Rainbow-Colored Gardens

• Flowers come in a wide array of hues, so why not celebrate that diversity with a rainbow garden through which you can teach a young child color recognition? The best place for rainbow gardens is on a slope where the child can easily see each layer. Finding green flowers may prove difficult. Consider using green groundcover for that layer. For the remaining layers begin with the color red. In a full sun garden, red options include summer poinsettia and pot marigold. For orange flowers consider zinnia and hibiscus. For yellow there's always sunflowers or yellow roses, followed by Ageratum 'Hawaii Blue' or blue thistle, and lavender or purple coneflower for violet.

Climbing Flowers

• Climbing flowers take up less space in a garden and give you an ideal location for tracking your child's growth. Set up one of the trellises so that you can easily mark it from month to month, letting your child see the way she's inching upward just like the flowers. There are several different types of climbing flowers, but those that use support structures like wisteria make it easier to create a special location for your ongoing measurements. Nearly any climbing plant will work for this type of garden, however. Some other hardy choices include clematis, morning glory and honeysuckle.