Tall stems at the back, creeping foliage at the front, one red repeated from scarlet through carmine to vermilion, and red-barked dogwood holding the picture together in winter: a flower bed is a composition. Choose plants that suit your climate, soil, slope and exposure, and it will look good in every season.
Best news: no need to be a landscaper to succeed! If you follow our advice, creating a flowerbed will be something you’ll quickly master!
No need to be Monet or Van Gogh, all you want to do is visualize your project on paper.
It’ll really help a lot when planning things out: space, volume, colors…
An hour spent sketching the plants out will save a day’s heavy work out in the sun, and you’ll feel more at peace knowing what you’re doing.
Measure the bed and draw it to scale, so that the number of plants on paper matches the space you actually have.
Draw each plant as a circle the width it will reach at maturity, not the width of the pot you buy it in.
Mark on the sketch where you will stand or sit to look at the bed.
Lay a hose or a length of rope on the ground to trace the outline, then step back and view it from an upstairs window before you cut the edge.
The first rule, and possibly the most important one to make a flower bed, is to select plants based on their future growing environment. They’ll thrive all the more for this. The criteria you should consider are the following:
Also: climate-adjusted plants
Test drainage by digging a hole and filling it with water: if it is still standing hours later, pick plants that tolerate damp rather than Mediterranean shrubs such as lavender.
A cheap soil pH kit tells you whether camellias and rhododendrons will flourish or turn yellow, since they only thrive in acid ground.
On a slope, the top dries out fastest and the foot stays wettest, so plant drought-tolerant species high and moisture-lovers low.
When you glance at a garden, the first thing you notice are its colors: green lawn, tree leaves, different spots of colored flowers, mulch and walkways etc.
Thanks to the colors of all these elements, you can imagine three types defining set-ups: monochromatic (or camaïeu, as the artistic term goes), harmony and contrast.
The goal here is simple: choose a color for flowers or foliage and repeat it in as many hues as can be.
For instance, if you select “red”, you can find plants that have colors ranging from scarlet to blood red to carmine to vermilion to imperial red…
The goal is completely different in this case, since harmony makes it possible to rely on different colors.
For example, if “red” is still the basis, you might complement that main hue with plants that are orange or violet. In case you prefer “blue”, then pair it with various shades of green, for instance.
This time, you have to find the perfect opposite of the color you chose:
To help you in choosing your colors, you can rely on the chromatic circle.
Colour is the first thing anyone notices in a garden, and the article boils the choices down to three set-ups. Decide which one you are aiming for before you buy a single plant.
| Colour set-up | How it works | Worked example |
|---|---|---|
| Camaïeu (monochromatic) | One single colour, repeated in as many hues as you can find | Red, from scarlet to blood red, carmine, vermilion and imperial red |
| Harmony | A main hue complemented by different, neighbouring colours | Red with orange or violet; blue with various shades of green |
| Contrast | The chosen colour paired with its perfect opposite | Blue against orange, green against red, yellow against violet |
Whichever set-up you pick, the chromatic circle shows you which hues sit next to each other and which sit opposite.
Bring volume to your garden with a garden bed that features wonders at different heights: plants and blooms that are tall and short.
However, just like in an extended family photo, stay logical: tall in the back, short in front!
This concept is also used when setting up a mixed border between your garden and the neighbor’s.
In an island bed seen from every side, place the tallest plants down the middle and step the heights down towards each edge.
Leave room behind tall plants so you can reach them for deadheading.
Bring one airy, see-through plant such as Verbena bonariensis to the front so the tiers do not read like a staircase.
We tend to only think of the garden bed as a flower bed. But flowers only last a short while! They aren’t eternal, just like us – though we do get more seasons than they do.
When flowers have faded away, you must rely on something else to still make your garden bed look great. Vary the shape and bearing of your plants and shrubs: bushy, erect, creeping, etc. This will bring movement and vitality to your flower bed.
Repeating the same shape at intervals along the bed is a widely used planting-design technique, encouraging the eye to travel across the whole border rather than stopping at a single isolated oddity.
Let creeping plants spill over the front edge to soften paving.
A common garden-design convention treats upright, columnar forms as accents used sparingly for emphasis, on the reasoning that many repeated spires can read as restless and weaken a planting’s calm background.
Check the mature spread on the label before planting, because some shrubs grow considerably wider than they are tall and can crowd out or smother low-growing neighbours.
Who doesn’t think a garden in winter looks drab and sad? Think again! When making the most of what nature provides, it’s actually quite easy to have a very beautiful garden even in Winter:
For the remaining seasons, simply imagine how your plants will evolve as the year rolls on:
Fuzzy leaves of the Stachys, coarse leaves of leatherleaf viburnum, smooth, shiny or mat, plants come up with more imagination than we might ever, all for the pleasure of combining them into stunning shrub and flower beds that, for sure, won’t look boring.
Put the woolly Stachys along the front edge, where hands brush past it.
Stachys rots over winter in heavy, wet soil, so reserve it for free-draining ground and water at the base rather than over the leaves.
Walk around the neighborhood and chat with owners of beautiful flower beds. They’ll be more than happy to share what they’re proud of and what they would have done better!
