How to Put Together Flowering Plants

Planning

• 1

  Make a list of the flowers you want in your garden. Consider characteristics like height, blooming season, fragrance and color to help you place them in your design schematic.

• 2

  Design a graph of your garden bed. For best results, make it at least 6 feet from front to back to allow room for plants to grow and bloom.

• 3

  Assign plants more than 3 feet high to the back of the bed. If they are spring bulbs, plant tall annuals or perennials that bloom in late spring or early summer next to them to replace their faded flowers.

• 4

  Designate spaces for flowers 1 to 3 feet tall in the middle of the bed. Mix flowers that mound with those that arch or spread to increase visual interest.

• 5

  Reserve the front of the bed for 1-foot border flowers like alyssum or daisies. Orient the bed toward the viewer. For example, plant the border flowers where they can be seen from a kitchen window.

Flowers

• 6

  Designate areas for perennial flowers like roses, lilies and irises according to their flowering period to give you continuous blooms all summer.

• 7

  Add annuals in areas where perennials will fade after their flowering period. Annuals provide blooms all summer and into the fall and take over for perennials when their flowering season is over.

• 8

  Mix the types of flowering plants in your bed. Mounds of blooms mixed with flower spikes and arching flowering shrubs create interest and texture.

• 9

  Create a monochromatic color scheme like a moon garden's variety of white flowering plants, or a patriotic red, white and blue flowering bed for July 4.

• 10

  Consider each flower's season. Gladioli bloom just once, so after the blooms fade you'll need another plant to take over blooming in the rear of the garden.

Specialty

• 11

  Plan a bed that features the plants you favor. Create a fragrant garden by combining perennials like roses, peonies and lilies and add annuals like sweet peas, heliotrope, stocks and carnations to add their perfumes all summer.

• 12

  Select a single genus for your garden. Mix the color, fragrance and variety of lilies or combine fibrous begonias with hanging and upright tuberous varieties.

• 13

  Choose long-lasting flowers suitable for cutting to provide bouquets all summer from your cut flower garden.

• 14

  Enhance your flower garden by adding plants with variegated, unusual or colorful foliage. The flowers of the annual coleus are not impressive, but the leaves come in a huge range of colors, patterns, sizes and shapes that add as much contrast and interest to a flower bed as flowers.