The Beginner's Garden

Making It Look Great

Mar 24, 2009

In this time of economic hardships, new gardeners can't afford to buy plants in 5 gallon pots. So new gardens can look very bare.

There is no need for even the newest gardener to have a blank looking garden if he plans carefully and employs a couple of easy “in the meanwhile” tips.

Planning for Planting

First, take stock of the plants you have available to you, as well as those you plan to buy. Check to see what the recommended spacing is for each plant. If the books say that a 3” peony will grow to three feet wide, believe it. Don’t stick in another perennial a foot away just to make the gaps less obvious. Plants grow. It’s just not easy to believe when the plant is a 2-leaf daylily division or a one foot high tree seedling.
Draw out a rough sketch of your garden and plants, (on grid paper if necessary) and mark the position of the plants to go into the new bed. Allow for proper spacing, but also try to allow for varying heights. If the garden is to be viewed from only one side, place taller plants in back, shortest in the front. Also try to vary texture, mixing large leafed plants with those of medium and finer leaves. For example, broad leafed hostas mix well with airy ferns and the medium-sized leaves of hellebores or bleeding hearts.
Don't forget that hot colors like red and yellow advance and can be planted toward the rear of a bed without being overlooked; cool colors recede. Color in the garden is a personal choice, but try to limit the palette to 3-5 colors. Any more and the bed may look like a mass of party colored polka dots. Keep drifts of color together for a lovely design statement.
Finally, try to keep the number of different perennials in the bed to a relatively small number. This makes it easier to match the plants’ cultural requirements (moisture needs, light preference, etc.) to the garden, and also makes it easier to create a splash with drifts of a single plant grouped together rather than dots of color and texture scattered here and there.

Dealing with Bare Space

Chances are that when you have planted all your pass-along plants and nursery purchases you have a lot of bare space. Gardening helps us to cultivate patience. But there are easy ways to fill those gaps without creating a nightmarish web of too-close perennials in the future.

First, use attractive shrubs as the bones of the garden layout. Ornamental dogwoods often have attractively colored twigs in winter, and can be cut down almost to the ground in spring, so they won’t outgrow their allotted space. The white, pink and green leafed willow, “Hagiri Nishiki’ is lovely in a pastel garden and can also be cut back as needed. Try a rose bush or three (plantings always look best in odd numbers) for a flowering alternative. These will fill space quickly and help cut down on the feeling that the garden is bare.
Second – and this is the key secret – use annuals to fill in while your perennials grow. Buy flats of Nicotiana (flowering tobacco), poppies or whatever suits your design at the local nursery, or try sowing seeds of fast growing plants. Castor beans (Ricinus communis) will grow to 5’ in a summer with giant leaves – great for filling in the back of the border. Nasturtiums thrive in even poor soil and will fill in the front of the border in no time. Larkspur, snapdragons or cosmos can be lovely mid-border. There are many fast growing annuals to choose from, and many will bloom all summer if deadheaded.

Let the Garden Mature

Don’t expect your new garden to look abundant from day one. Allow it to grow and mature, and fill in the bare spots with annuals. Plan the bones of the garden to include a few manageable shrubs that will add substance right from the start and your garden will look colorful and bounteous in the very first year.

The copyright of the article The Beginner's Garden in Flower Gardens is owned by Carol Wallace. Permission to republish The Beginner's Garden in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.