Picking The Best Flowers For Your Garden

By Pat Lowe

Growing a garden for your yard can greatly enhance your appreciation of your surroundings. Some people choose to plant butterfly gardens that attract hummingbirds, dragonflies and butterflies to watch. Others prefer water gardens, where frogs and fish play. You may want a cutting garden off to the side, where you can snip the beautiful buds to bring inside or you might decide upon a year-round display in front of the house for all the neighbors to see. The possibilities are limitless, but the first step is assessing how much space you have to work with. Next, you will need to think about the types of flowers you'd like to plant.

Before you start cultivating a garden, you'll want to understand about the growing zone you reside in. The right place to start is the National Gardening Association's site, which will let you know which hardiness zone you live in, together with which plants are best suited to your particular climate. In the lower left-hand corner, you'll notice an area for "Local Guides," where it is possible to select your state and your city to discover which flowers and veggies you are able grow, about caring for your garden and cooking from your garden. These pointers can make it easier to start considering which kinds of flowers you'd like to plant.

Those with not much gardening knowledge will frequently prefer to transplant annuals that have previously been grown at a garden center. You may also try experimenting with a container garden grown from seeds. Many people garden quite extensively with containers and put them all close to each other, so you see a full garden instead of the individual containers. Make sure you learn which annuals will endure in hot or cold conditions, grow in poor soil, have a brief bloom period, can be planted in the fall and are best for your type of soil.

Some people enjoy growing a garden that will magically come back each year, without replanting. This is called a perennial garden. Backyard Gardener is a great site where you'll learn about perennials for backgrounds, for edging, for hardy environments, for long blooming seasons, for old-fashioned gardens and for semi-shade gardens. Some popular perennials include peonies, bleeding hearts, columbine, daffodils, crocuses, irises, asters, chrysanthemums, daisies, violets and black eyed Susan. You'll need to pay special attention to color, height and bloom period are all equally important when dealing with perennials.

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. - 32376

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