How to Plan Flower Beds

Planning your garden in advance can help keep you from planting short marigolds behind flowers that will grow taller.

Planning your flower beds on paper will help you foresee some problems with your garden layout. In general, you should place taller flowers at the back of your bed with shorter flowers at the front. Mid height flowers will do best in the center of your garden. If possible, orient your flower bed so that the back is to the north. This will prevent taller flowers from shading your shorter flowers.

Things You'll Need

• Graph paper
• Pencil
• Colored pencils (optional)

Instructions

1. Sketch the outline of your garden on your graph paper. The scale of your graph paper will depend on the size of your garden and the density of squares on your paper. However, one square per foot is often workable for medium-sized flower gardens.

2. Research the recommended plant spacing for the flowers that you want to plant in your garden. If you are planting seeds, the seed packets often have this information. If you are planting nursery seedlings, the information spike in the plant often gives distance recommendation.

3. Sketch the planting locations of your flowers. This will give you an indication of how many nursery plants or seed packets you will need.

4. Sketch the overall divisions in your garden beds with tall flowers in the back and short flowers in the front. Take into consideration the overall spacing of the flowers that you have established in Step 2.

5. Consider how the colors of your flowers will work together by shading areas of your drawing with the colors of the flowers that you are planning on planting. For example, if you will have sunflowers at the back, shade the back on paper as yellow. If the front will be poppies, shade the poppy area of your paper red.

6. Continue to sketch out the placement of all of your plantings and finalize the layout.

Tips & Warnings

• Start planning your flower bed before you actually plant. This will give you time to study the design and make changes as you create a mental image of how your garden will look when complete.

References

• Better Homes and Gardens: Hot Color Flower Garden Plan
• Mahalo: How to Plant a Flower Garden