How to Decide What to Plant in a Flower Garden

When you get to the stage of choosing what to plant in a bed or border, there are several important preliminary decisions that will influence the look of your garden throughout the year. Because they are essentially decisions based on personal preference, ask yourself these questions before you decide what to plant:

-Do you want the same color scheme to be constant throughout the growing season, or do you want a changing garden colors with one wave after the next?

-Do you want a flower garden that is orderly and defined or an unstructured look more reminiscent of an English cottage garden?

-Do you want a diversity of plant and flower forms, or plants that are more or less similar in appearance?

-Does your space limit you to small, compact plants, or can you accommodate some of the rangier, taller-growing annuals to use as background plantings?

-Do you want a dual-purpose flower garden for both landscape color and cut flowers?

-Are there any favorite plants that you "must have," or colors that you should not plant because of the color of a background wall, fence, or neighboring plant? There are instances where something as common as a red brick wall or fence will overwhelm various shades of pink flowers. Or perhaps a purple-leafed plum tree with its bronzy foliage will make it unattractive to plant flowers in certain shades of violet or blue.

Depending on how you answer the questions, here are some other factors to think about:

If you want a constant display of the same colors in a bed or border, be sure and choose annuals with a long blooming season: those that bloom early and keep flowering until the first frost in fall. They will minimize the amount of planting and replanting necessary to keep the display going throughout the season. Some of the longest-blooming are sweet alyssum, ageratum, morning glory, impatiens, petunias, marigolds, and zinnias.

There are some gardeners who expect more from flower beds and borders than a consistent display of the same combination of colors. These usually want an ever-changing garden to entice them out of doors just to see what's coming into bloom next. This garden demands more work, especially in the planning department, but the rewards are definitely there.

Plant taller-growing varieties to the rear of lower-growing ones. If annuals of several different heights are to be used, stair-step them from the tallest to the lowest. You might start in the back row with tall cosmos or one of the smaller sunflowers such as the 4-foot 'Picollo', add a few clumps of hollyhocks, then in the middle mass some tall marigolds or zinnias, and end in the front with a combination of ageratum, petunias, lobelia, and alyssum.

The description on the backs of seed packets will tell you the heights of plants and how far apart to space them. If you like a very abundant, lush look, you can usually get away with spacing them a little closer than recommended; but if you put plants too close together or don't thin them out enough, they will compete with one another for sun, water, root space, and nutrients, and will likely produce inferior flowers.

Using contrasting foliage textures and colors can be as interesting as combining different types of bloom. There are even some annuals whose primary quality is foliage rather than their flowers; for example, amaranthus, dusty miller, the many varieties of coleus, and ornamental cabbage and kale.