How to arrange a flower bed?

Annual flowers are more convenient for landscape design than perennials. With their help, flower plantations of various forms are easily created, which create interesting and luxurious landscapes on the plots. How to plant them?

Most often, the following types of plantings are formed from plants that bloom only a year:

• flowerbed;
• modular flower garden;
• mixborder.

Flowerbed

A flower bed is a plant composition that has a clear outline of shape and boundaries. The classic shape of a flower bed is a circle, square or rhombus, but other shapes can be used if desired.

When creating flower beds from annual flowers for summer cottages, it is allowed to use a variety of plant species. In this case, the ornament is created only on one plane.

Modular flower garden

Recently, the arrangement of modular flower beds has become increasingly popular. This name is understood as a kind of flower beds when plants are planted in containers. Such compositions look quite impressive and original.

You can use any containers, you determine their size and shape yourself. An important advantage of a modular flower garden is mobility. Thanks to this, different compositions can be formed from such flower containers, transferred to another place in whole or in part.

It is worth noting that only blooming annual flowers are used for modular compositions.

Mixborders

Mixborders are original flower beds in several levels. Often plants are planted in blocks. It is important to choose the types of flowers so that the blocks have different heights and colors. In such a multi-level composition, at the end of the flowering period of one species, it is replaced by a second one.

Mixborders are actively used by landscape designers, because they look spectacular, much more interesting than the usual flower beds.

Choosing the Right Varieties

Any catalog of annual flowers offers a fairly wide selection of seeds for every taste. But if you decide to add several annual crops to the perennial inhabitants of your flower bed, or form a fully flowering planting of these plants, you need to know the important nuances that will help you make the right choice.

When buying seeds, you need to pay attention to three main factors:

• in what period does flowering occur;
• landing sites;
• color range.

Annual varieties often have a fairly long flowering period. But at the same time, each flower ripens at its appointed time. Early flowering spring varieties include petunia, begonia, pelargonium. With the onset of June, cornflower, marigolds, marigold will dissolve the buds.

To make your garden full of colors until late autumn, it is better to give preference to asters, snapdragons, calendula. These plants are quite hardy and will please the eye until the first frost.

An important aspect when choosing the necessary varieties is determining the place where they will grow. After all, each flower has its own characteristics (straight, bush-like or curly) and the height of the stems.

When decorating front gardens, choose undersized varieties of flowers (marigolds, nasturtium, cornflowers). They rise quite a bit above the soil surface, so they create the effect of a bright living rug.

To ennoble fences, arbors and other vertical surfaces, cultures are needed that curl well. An ideal choice for this purpose would be varieties of decorative curly beans, sweet peas or morning glory.

To fill the container for a modular flower garden, choose flowers that have bushy stems, for example, petunias, begonias, geraniums. Several of these flowers will fill the entire surface of the container.

Remember that the annual flower is very fond of the sun. Therefore, when planning their placement, choose places that are as open to sunlight as possible.

To make flower beds and other flower plantings look perfect, you need to choose the right color scheme. This aspect must be thought out in advance, and after looking at the photos of annual flowers in the catalog, choose the right ones. Remember that excessive variegation will not be a plus, all shades should be combined harmoniously.

Varieties of undersized annuals

Undersized flowers include flowers whose stem height does not exceed thirty centimeters. Such cultures are particularly elegant. Most often, the seeds of annual flowers of «small growth» are sown in the intervals between tall bushes of perennial varieties (roses, lilies) to hide the empty soil.

If necessary, to decorate rockeries, rock gardens and other decorative elements of the landscape, preference should be given to the shortest representatives of flowering plants.

The ideal choice is Iberis, which blooms throughout the summer with graceful white clouds. This category also includes light blue nemophiles, night violets, which have a bright and strong aroma, as well as dwarf viola.

If you need beautiful, but unpretentious flowers, pay attention to silver cellosia, phlox, lobelia and forget-me-nots.

Medium and high grades

Flowers with a stem length of up to eighty centimeters are considered to be of medium height. Often the names of annual flowers in this category are found in recommendations for creating the basis of a mixed flower bed and other flowering plantations.

Their range, perhaps the widest, includes crops such as poppies, antirinnum, verbena, salvia. Extraordinarily beautiful, as well as unpretentious in care, are mattiola, esholzia, kosmeya.

High flowers will also look impressive in general compositions. These include plants one and a half meters long. The addition of dahlia, amaranth, fragrant tobacco, aruncus, datura can add originality to the mixborder.

You can decorate a green lawn with delphinium and mallow. These plants look perfect in «solo» plantings, or as filling the background of a flower bed.

Annual flowers are actively used to create various landscape compositions. You can plant their seeds directly into the soil, and if early flowering is necessary, it is better to take seedlings. But remember that you need to select them in accordance with each otherso that the resulting composition is harmonious.

Photo of annual flowers