How to Lay Out Flower Beds

Tagged As:

The layout of the flower beds can break or make the final result. When it comes to aesthetics, then the layout is the most essential factor since it will highlight the colors, shapes and textures you’ve chosen to accent your landscape. The mattresses should complement your house, not compete with it, and should tie your landscape and house jointly with character. Textures, shapes and colors all play a vital role in creating the ideal bed to accentuate your house.

Add a few curves to your flower beds, to add interest and create a more flowing, casual look, while complementing the straight, angular lines of your residence and property.

Keep the taller plants in the rear of mattresses that are against the property and maintain stature toward the center for beds that are standalone. Use a darker color at the rear or center of the bed to make your colorful flowers stick out against a dark backdrop of evergreens or similarly dark foliage. A variety of kinds of boxwood would make a fine, formal backdrop, while the glossy, dark green leaf of Knock Out roses would add a little bit of color and height. Because of the front of their mattresses, consider low-growing flowers like Grecian windflowers, hardy asters, various carnations or groundcovers.

Keep the backdrop in proportion with the rest of the bed. A good guideline is to maintain the height of the backdrop, while it is a fence or shrub border, as tall as the bed is deep. For stand-alone beds where the backdrop is in the center, the height of the shrubbery needs to be as tall as the thickness of the bed from the center to the outer edge.

Coordinate colors so that the bed is satisfying to the eye. Use colors that are opposite each other on a color wheel. For instance, plant bright yellow blooms like yellow foxglove or Carolina Moonlight false indigo, with deep blues or violets such as Blue Fortune hyssop or Heath asters. Reds, like Lucifer crocosmia or Atom gladiolus, stand out and complement the greens of hostas or ferns. Alternatively, keep similar colors together like violets and deep blues or reds with red-oranges and red-violets.

Plant flowers of the identical type in groups of five or five as opposed to planting one specimen of each type, to create a fluid appearance and add more visual interest.

Plant small, ornamental trees or even smaller shrubs as an accent in the center and on the outer edges of the bed. Various Japanese maples will stay under 10 feet tall, although the weeping “Lavender Twist” redbud only reaches 6 to 8 ft tall. The rule of stature does not apply to these accent trees or tall shrubs, but prevent putting sun-loving plants within their own shadows.

Keep plants with similar requirements in the same sections of big beds. For smaller beds, all your plants must have the same requirements, including soil moisture, drainage, sunlight, pH and water.

Maintain your front beds smaller, somewhat less interesting but still verdant, than the mattresses towards the back or sides. Since the eye moves throughout your lawn, the mattresses should become more visually appealing, leading up to some grand finale. In the front beds, consider additional leaf and less color, like evergreen shrubs with a few scattered groups of perennials. As you reach the final bed, you may make an explosion of color and texture.

See related