How To Design a Perennial Flower Bed

Here’s how to design a perennial flower bed in a few short steps. The first tip is to draw the general plan on paper as you’re thinking about it. You don’t have to make it fancy, and you don’t have to really include every plant but you do want to include some sense of what you’re thinking. (Don’t show it to anyone if you’re not happy with it - just use it as your thinking-dreaming workspace). And yes, drawing it out really does help you in the long run - for example, you’ll wind up saving money on plants if you know what you’re going to be putting into the design.

First Step

Decide where you’re going to see the garden from. This point-of-view allows you to plan to put the taller plants at the back of the garden (instead of at the front where they’ll block out the rest of the blooms).

Step Two

Decide if you want your garden to bloom heavily in the spring, in the summer, in the fall or a little bit all summer long. This decision determines what kinds of plants you pick, and where you’re going to be planting them.

Some of you might think that everybody would want a garden to be in bloom all summer-long. If you go away for the summer (to a cottage for example) then you want your garden to bloom in the spring and fall but not the summer when you’re not there to see it. You won’t buy summer-blooming plants.

Echinacea and Russian Sage Combination

Step Three:

Is your garden a sunny garden or a shady garden?

The rule of thumb here is that if you’re in the north and your garden gets sunshine between 10 am and 2 pm, you have a sunny garden. That’s a full 4 hours of hot sunshine and it will likely get sun on either side of that as well.

If your garden doesn’t get it between those hours then you may have a part-shade garden (sunshine at either end of those hours but no mid-day sunshine). Or you might have a shade-garden with sunshine only dappled or only in the early morning before 10 or in the evening after 6.

To give you the practical information on this rather than the theoretical - there’s a lot of overlap between the classes of sunny- part-sun, and shade gardens. There’s no hard and fast answer because it depends on the garden, the plants you like and the conditions in the garden. It does depend on a little experimentation so don’t hesitate to try a sun-loving plant in the sunniest spot you have; you might be pleasantly surprised.

Step Four

Pick the plants that bloom at the time you want to see the blooms - and make sure they’re the plants that survive in your sun-conditions. So if you want a spring garden, pick only spring-blooming perennials. or summer-blooming plants or fall-blooming plants

You might also want to check this list of long-blooming plants.

Step Five

The trick to having a garden that blooms all summer is to pick an equal amount of flowers from each of the three bloom periods. So if your garden is going to have 30 plants in it, you want 10 from each of the spring, summer and fall-blooming periods.

And the second trick here is to space them equally through the garden. So when we talk about how to design a perennial flower bed for best results, we don’t clump all your spring bloomers in one spot and your fall bloomers in another. Mix them all up.

Warning!

The problem that most gardeners have is when they go to the garden center in the spring, the only plants that are in bloom are the spring-bloomers. Colour sells! So you buy spring bloomers because they look good when you’re buying. The fall bloomers are sitting there looking like little chunks of green. In the fall, they’ll be magnificent but in the spring - they look like sticks and the average gardener won’t buy them. Print out the plant lists above - take them with your to the garden center and buy an equal number of plants from each list.

Bottom Line

Here’s something that not too many gardeners think about. A perennial garden is a constantly changing thing. Plants grow up and want to expand. Some plants die. Some you really like, some you really dislike. A perennial garden doesn’t stay the same from year to year (even weather changes the way flowers look or how long they last).

So you’re on a “process” of gardening, you get to change and adjust from year to year looking for that look that’s “just right”. It’s not a plant and forget kind of garden (use annuals if you want that).

And that’s the fun of it all. You start with the simple steps above and then year by year you adjust and change your garden as you find plants you like, color themes you like and get rid of all those you don’t like.

And that’s the way you start on your “how to design a perennial flower bed” project.t

A mixed perennial border in my garden (Echinacea, Campanula, iris, Kirengeshoma, Rheum, Geraniums, and some petunias snuck in there too) :-)

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