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Create a flowering border like a painter
• Create a scenery with pots
• Growing plants in unusual containers
• Make your potted plants more beautiful
• Choose the material of pots
• Look after your pots to make them last
• The right pot for the right plant
• Upright-growing plants in pot
• Growing a tree in a pot
• Hiding a cumbersome stump
• Hiding the compost heap
• Optimize Trees
• How to redesign a flowerbed ?
• Create a flowering border like a painter
• Harmonise foliage between them
• Succeed with your borders
• An attractive garden in winter
• Create a Mediterranean corner
• Create an exotic area
• Create a Japanese corner
• Create a green roof
• Create a rockery
• An Acer, for all gardens
The garden is the ultimate inspiring site for painting… and vice versa! A few tips allow you to enjoy a flowering bed as if it was a painting.
Create your palette
This is going to be the most difficult part as the choice of plants is so vast! The site’s conditions will determine which part of this palette you are going to use. Ascertain the growing conditions first in order to offer your plants the best conditions, that is to say the amount of sunlight and the type of soil. Then define the colours that you wish to stage. A multi-coloured scenery is easier to create than a flowering bed with only homogeneous colours.
Scenery based on yellow: the flowers but also the foliage must be chosen according to the chosen theme.
For this flowering bed shaded by a big hedge, mostly pale colours have been chosen.
In the shade, rely more on foliage.
Then select the plants, sorting them out by size and by flowering periods. The professionals cut (on paper) the flowering bed in squares of 1 m sides. In each square they make sure that they place at least one interesting plant for each season and of identical height. The squares at the front of the border are filled with low-growing plants (less than 50cm) and the ones at the back with higher-growing plants (more than 1m). Thanks to this tip, you only need to fill the rest of the squares with plants of your choice according to the growing conditions of the site, and of course, your budget. To organise yourself, draw the plan of your flowering bed on paper and note the names of the plants on small pieces of paper so that you can place them and move them as you please.
Good to know: sunny sites call for bright and colourful colours whereas shady spots are better suited to soft, pastel colours. But there is no absolute rule and everything is a question of taste…
Small flowers form a rather diffuse mass.
Prefer small flowers
A tip to create a flowering bed worthy of a painting consists to choose plants which produce small flowers rather than large ones. Avoid flowers such as Sunflowers or Dahlias. On the contrary, look for hazy, diffuse blossoms.
Think about the four seasons
If you wish for your scene to look interesting throughout the entire year, you must include in your green palette plants which stay looking beautiful in winter. It could be ornamental grasses which have colourful leaves, plants of which the decorative inflorescences stay on the stem, evergreen perennials, etc. Do not regroup them in only one spot of the flowering bed but on the contrary, insert them in between the other plants so as when the time comes the entire flowering border looks interesting.
A willowy silhouette amongst fine ornamental grasses: the right duo between plants and decoration.
Do not forget about decoration
A well sited decorative object can enhance plants just as much as the opposite. Only place one decorative item per flowering bed unless you choose a variation on the same theme (an object in several different sizes).
You can also place decorative items which will be hidden by foliage during summer and be revealed in winter. This decorator’s tip allows counterbalancing the lack of greenery and an eventual lack of interest during the off- season. Clever, no?
