Growing a garden full of fresh, lovely flowers is an enjoyable experience if you don’t mind getting down and dirty. Sure, it’s easy to go out and buy a potted plant or a bouquet for the table, but you won’t get the same sense of wonderment, pride and joy as you do from growing your own. Garden guides will tell you that the first step to creating a successful garden is to look at your space and determine how much garden you can muster. Many homeowners will go with a front yard display to improve the look of the house, while more zealous gardeners will spread the joy into their backyards too. If you live in a condo, townhouse or apartment, you can still experiment with patio and windowsill gardens.
Those with little gardening experience will often opt to transplant annuals that have already been grown at a nursery. This is a quick-fix garden for the front yard if you’re hurrying to catch up with the neighbors. You may also try container gardening from seed as an experiment. Once the containers fill with blooms, you can bring them out to the front yard. Some people garden rather extensively with containers and place them all next to one another, so you see a full garden, rather than the individual pots. Petunias, marigolds, begonias, geraniums, impatiens, pansies, petunias and salvia are popular varieties. A good place to start is at www.backyardgardener.com/annual/index.html, where you can learn which annuals will endure in cold weather, endure in heat, grow in poor soil, have a short bloom season, can be sown in the fall and are best for your soil type.
If you’re up for more of a challenge when growing a garden, or if you just don’t want to deal with replanting every season, then you can try perennial flower gardening. A perennial flower typically lives for three to five seasons before needing to be replaced. Most perennials bloom for just one to three weeks once a year, so timing is everything when growing plants like these. Popular perennials include lilies, asters, chrysanthemums, daisies, columbine, coral bells, foxglove, gladioluses, hibiscuses, hostas, hyacinths, larkspurs, poppies, primroses, sunflowers, verbenas and violets. Longer blooming perennials can last two to four months, which include yarrow, bellflower,red valerian, gaillardia (blanket flowers), fringed bleeding hearts, blazing stars, black-eyed Susan, spiderworts, stonecrops and pin cushion flowers.
An important part of growing a garden successfully is also growing the right flowers in the right places. There are sun flowers, shade flowers and partial sun/shade flowers to consider. For a shade garden, consider begonias, hellebore, violets, hostas, bleeding hearts, columbine, impatiens, violas and torenias. For full sun, consider perennial salvias, threadleaf coreopsis, cosmos, dahlias, petunias, sweet peas, zinnias, geraniums and daylilies. For part-sun or part-shade, include pansies, sapphire flowers, creeping zinnias, lobelia, browallia, coleus or floss flowers. By understanding garden design, you should be able to put together a wonderful assortment of color and variety.
