Adding color to your landscape can be a relatively easy and enjoyable experience. There are so many beautiful flowers to choose from in every color of the rainbow. My earliest memories of gardening include stunning colorful flowers in my grandma’s yard. This was something I always wanted in my own yard.
Where did your love of flowers start?
Create a Flower Garden: Beginner’s Guide
A flower garden adds color and beauty to your yard. Birds, bees and butterflies love flowers too. By planting a flower garden you will attract wildlife to your yard.
Take a look around your yard and locate a space you would like to create your garden. Then ask yourself a couple questions:
What time of day does this area get sun? How many hours of sun does it get?
Phoenix Arizona Flower Garden: Types of Flowers
There are three different types of flowers:
- Annuals (example: petunia)
- Perennials (example: iris)
- Biennials (example: california poppy)
Annual Flowers
Annuals are flowers that last one year. They are grown from seed each year and then they bloom. Once the season is over you’ll have to replant them.
Many annual flowers in Phoenix will bloom just about all year, although I have a hard time keeping any of my annuals looking well in July or August.
Perennial Flowers for Your Garden
Perennials are plants that flower and return each year, usually undergoing some type of dormant period. A perennial is a plant that doesn’t have to be planted each year, but rather lives from year to year.
Perennials can include flowers, herbs, trees, shrubs and vines.
When choosing perennials look for varieties that offer different bloom times and interplant to create a colorful garden no matter what the season.
Biennial Flowers
Your vision of a perfect flower garden doesn’t happen overnight. The first year your garden will not look like the photos in the gardening magazines.
Don’t worry by the second year your plants should have filled in and out and you’ll have learned something on this journey as well. Some of those plants won’t make it, or you’ll decide you don’t like there placement and you will probably rearrange some plants.
By the third year you and your garden are like old friends and your time and energy is rewarded with an incredible display of colors and textures.
Mix up your flower garden with both annuals and perennials to enjoy year round color.
There is a gardening saying: The first year a garden sleeps, second year it creeps and the third year it leaps.