The Essentials of How to Plan a Garden
When planning a garden, consider design basics such as theme, color, scent, or a combination. If you're planning a perennial, annual, or shade garden, which plants will work? And what's the best spot for a vegetable bed? A large part of garden design calls for a good understanding of plant life cycles, plant hardiness, and hardiness zones.
Tips for Designing a Garden Plan
Before you start planting, you need to create a garden plan. Start by using graph paper and drawing a plan of your garden site to scale. Plot every feature you find on your site, both natural and those [more…]
Choosing a Garden Theme
Designing a garden often goes beyond deciding which plants you want to grow and the type of function you want your garden to have. Thematic elements can also influence the look of a garden. Do you have [more…]
How to Combine Color and Scent in an Annual Garden
Gardening encourages creativity. You can design annual beds in eye-catching color combinations or grow fragrant blossoms to enjoy. Annuals are great for colorful or scented bouquets for the house or for [more…]
Annual Gardens: How to Combine Plant Shapes and Sizes
Annual plants come in myriad sizes, shapes, and forms that enable you to experiment with new garden designs every year. Your garden annuals can be short, tall, spiky, mounding, full of flowers, beautifully [more…]
Tips for Designing Perennial Beds and Borders
Perennials return each year to provide splashes of color and texture to garden beds and borders. Here are some basic garden layout tips and techniques used by professional garden designers that you can [more…]
How to Time Flowering Perennials for All-Season Color
Although some perennials bloom all summer long, just like your favorite annuals, others don't. They have a period of glory that peaks for a week or several weeks, and then the show subsides. With proper [more…]
Gardening with Plants Made for the Shade
Don't fret if your garden gets more shade than sun; plenty of plants thrive in the shade. This chart names annuals and perennials that do well in the shade, so keep this list handy and you can decide which [more…]
Where to Put Your Vegetable Garden
When deciding where to plant your vegetable garden, assess sun exposure, soil quality, and water access. Choosing a garden site that's best for growing vegetables is based on good old common sense, as [more…]
Plant Life Cycles and Garden Design
The life cycles of all the plants you choose for your garden play a large part in the garden's overall design. A plant's life cycle consists of the amount of time it takes for them to become mature enough [more…]
Garden Planning: How to Assess a Plant's Hardiness
When choosing plants for your garden, pay attention to its hardiness, which determines how well it handles climate extremes, such as cold and heat. Plant catalogs often use the term rather loosely to indicate [more…]
How to Find Your Hardiness Zone with Maps
Hardiness zone maps help you determine which garden plants will thrive where you live. The various hardiness zone maps indicate minimum and maximum temperatures that plants can tolerate, or growing seasons [more…]
Solving Classic Garden Design Problems
When you plan your garden you have to start by assessing what you have. You want your garden to prosper in your climate and to pick plants that thrive in your soil. You must also take existing buildings [more…]
