Research Flower Characteristics

The best flower garden designers incorporate various blooming plants in a bed, including long-living perennials, short-term (but long-blooming) annuals, seasonal bulbs, ornamental grasses, and vines. Before starting your flower garden design, research plants that grow best in your area, their growing characteristics such as light conditions and deer resistance, and any special care they might need. Your local extension office or public garden is a good starting place.

Choose a Flower Garden Style

If you're struggling to determine your garden's style and size, consider your personal preferences and your home's architectural style. You'll also want to consider the composition of different flower garden designs based on the landscaping style and types of plants included. For example, a contemporary-leaning garden might take a minimalist approach and clearly define flower beds with hard lines. On the other hand, a cottage-style garden like the one pictured here encourages a mix-and-match approach with meandering paths and bed shapes.

Determine the Garden's Shape and Size

Flowering plants can be arranged in beds of almost any shape and size, from expansive rectangles to petite corner beds. To visualize how your flower garden will fit into the rest of your landscape, use a garden hose to outline the edges before you start digging. Walk around the bed and look at the proposed garden from every viewpoint. Test if you'll be able to access plants in the middle or if a walking path should be included.

If you're looking for flower garden ideas for beginners, start small to avoid becoming overwhelmed—you can continually expand your plan or go bigger the next year.

Select Flowering Plants

Once you've decided on your flower garden design, shape, and size, it's time to put your plant research into action. Choose an assortment of plants based on year-round interest, bloom time, show-stopping focal points, flower sizes, and color combinations. Also, consider bonus attributes such as fragrance and whether the flowers attract butterflies, hummingbirds, and other pollinators.

Evaluate Plant Size

Consider a plant's full height when making your selections. For example, if you want to plant a colorful foundation garden along the front of your house, the tallest plants will need to go in the back, but they shouldn't be so tall that they block windows or doors. Conversely, the tallest plants in an island flower garden should be planted in the center. Also, keep a plant's mature overall size in mind to ensure it has enough room to grow without crowding its neighbors or spilling out of the bed too much.

Review Bloom Times

Experienced flower garden designers always include a variety of plants with year-round interest and staggered bloom times. You don't want to create a garden full of colorful blooms in summer but flowerless in autumn. Combining different types of plants makes it easier to cover all the seasons. You can rely on shrubs to provide winter structure and spring blooms, perennials to lend summertime color, and flowering annuals to take over for fall.

Select Complementary Colors

Creating the best color combinations in your flower garden design can be tricky. A good place to start is the color wheel. Gardens planted in shades of the same hue are pleasing to the eye, as are colors next to each other on the color wheel, like purple and red. Colors across from each other, like purple and yellow, look good when paired too. Foliage provides a structural background of much-needed texture and color when blooms are wilted away.

Rely on Repetition

When laying out your flower garden design, aim to have more than one of each plant repeated throughout the bed. It's a visual design trick that creates cohesiveness, avoiding the appearance of a hodge-podge collection of plants. Expert flower garden designers include at least three (or any odd number) of the same kind of plant in a grouping because it is most pleasing to the eye. It also feels more dynamic than a symmetrical look with even plant numbers.

Provide a Focal Point

Every flower garden needs a focal point that gives the eye a place to land before moving across the rest of the flowerbed. That could mean anchoring a large bed with boxwood shrubs in the corners and a flowering shrub in the middle or planting a mass of a single flower type in the center of a skinny border. You can also add an exciting piece of garden art to stand out against its organic accompaniments.

Incorporate a Hardscape Element

Hardscape elements, like pergolas, trellises, and arbors, are beautiful complements to flower garden design. If you're crafting a bed that flows from the front yard to the backyard, a simple arbor draped with a climbing rose can help mark the transition from public to private spaces. Hardscape pieces also work as focal points.

Prepare the Planting Bed

Once you've decided on all the elements in your flower garden design, it's time to prep the bed by clearing away grass, weeds, and other debris where you want to plant. If it's a new, empty bed, add plenty of compost to boost the soil quality for your flowers. If you plan to have a path running through your flower garden, lay it before planting so you don't run out of space. You may also want to add edging, such as pavers, large rocks, or other materials.

Plant, Water, Mulch, and Enjoy

Now it's time to buy your plants! Do your best to stick to your flower garden list; it's easy to get carried away when facing all the beautiful options at your local nursery or garden center. While still in their nursery pots, place your plants on top of the soil where you want them to go before you dig any holes. This helps to see if you have enough plants to fill the space or need to adjust the arrangement.

Once you're satisfied with the layout, start digging holes and placing the plants into their new homes. All newly planted flowers should be well-watered. Lastly, add 1 to 2 inches of mulch over the whole bed. Monitor your rainfall and water as needed, ensuring your plants receive about an inch of water each week.