Flower Beds & Landscaping

Flower beds should complement the landscape.

A properly planned flower bed can add color and definition to an otherwise spare and dull yard. The shape and size of your flower bed will strongly affect how visitors perceive your property. The bed should complement and enhance the landscape, not compete with it.

View

Plant your flower bed with the spectator's perspective in mind. Visitors to your property will want to look at and enjoy your blooms. Locate the bed on a site that has easy access. Design the bed so it looks good from all angles. If you have a favorite outdoor area to relax in, such as a backyard deck, consider how the flower bed will look from that viewpoint.

Borders

Borders, beds that back up against a barrier such as a fence, fit well into most landscapes. Plant borders along the length of a driveway to add visual interest or next to a backyard patio. Combine a border flowerbed with a backdrop of larger shrubs. A border also softens the sharp corners of a yard. For homeowners with children, borders also have the practical advantage of leaving most of the lawn available for playing and activities.

Island

An island flower bed, one that you can walk around, is open an all sides. Irregularly shaped islands create a sense of informality in the landscape, while round or square islands sound a note of formality. Islands give the home gardener the opportunity to put a dash of color into a monotonous lawn. The taller plants in an island go in the middle, with the smaller plants at the edges. Because gardeners can access them from all sides, island beds are more easily maintained than border beds.

Color

Color provides visual beauty to your flower bed. But you can also use color to deflect attention from your yard's deficiencies. For example, warm colors, such as red and yellow, appear to advance to the eye. You can use this trait to plant red and yellow flowers in the back of your yard, which gives the illusion of shortening a long, narrow yard, advises North Dakota State University. Conversely, cool colors such as blue planted at the rear of a short yard give your landscape a sense of depth.

References

• University of Illinois Extension: Designing Flower Beds
• North Dakota State University: Flower Bed Planning
• University of California Cooperative Extension; Create Your Summer Flowers Beds Nows; Michele Le Stange