5 Tips to Improve Your Garden

Is your garden suffering from overall dullness? Do you envy your neighbour’s luscious landscape? Would you like to add a bit of bravura to your beds? If so, here are 5 tips to improve your garden, patio or landscape.

1. Dazzle with Contrasting Colours

Colours from opposite sides of the colour wheel are “contrasting colours” or “complimentary colours.” Blue and orange, yellow and purple, green and red are all examples of contrasting colours. Using them together to create a vibrant look is easy: plant contrasting colours together; add a contrasting-coloured garden accent to an existing bed; or use containers that contrast with plants to add impact to patios and decks. Yellow and Purple are on opposite sides of the colour wheel which is what makes these Yellow/Gold Flower Carpet® roses work so well with the purple salvia.

2. Spice Up Your Beds with Bands of Colour

Create a stunning landscape with long stretches of identical plants, or plants of the same colour.  Mix tall pink cleomes and zinnias, mid-height Volcano phlox, lower growing Flower Carpet Pink Supreme and add a low border of pink Wave petunias to create a long-blooming colour-filled border or bed.   If you want to keep it simple, select a few stunning varieties like Tropicanna® cannas mixed with coleus and plant in multiples – at least 6-9 plants in total. If you’re limited to container gardening, select several plants that have similar colours, either in their foliage or in their blooms.

3. Don’t Forget Fabulous Foliage

We often forget that foliage can play as important a role in the garden as flowers. Foliage plants come in a variety of colours, shades, shapes and sizes and can easily add impact to any garden or container – from small trees and shrubs to perennials and annuals, foliage can play an important role in any setting. Create a border or bed using mixed foliage, combining shades of green, purple, white and yellow, remembering that planting multiples of each will have the most impact. And, even when they’re not in bloom, fabulous foliage plants continue to add interest to the garden – some even more so as we move into autumn (such as the Pacific™ Coprosmas, seen below).

4. Texture is Tops

Using texture in the garden to create more interest is easy to do if you use the same principle we did with contrasting colours, only with this, you’re combining plants of opposite textures. The basic plant textures include bold (hostas, elephant ears, cannas); fine (astilbe, bleeding hearts, ferns, thyme); intermediate (roses, salvia, bee balm, coleus, euphorbia); and strap-like (grasses, cordylines, daylilies, iris, carex, alliums). Adding to that are fuzzy-leaf plants like sages, lambs ears, Artemisia and much more. So give it a try!  Combine soft Appleblossom Flower Carpet roses with grasses in a dry creek (where the river stones will give an extra texture bonus), or plant broad-leafed Canna Tropicanna with delicate angelonia, calibrachoa and sweet potato vine in a container.  In small gardens, using plants that have smaller or medium textures can make the garden appear larger.  Large-leafed and bold foliage used in larger spaces helps to bring things together and make the space feel more intimate.

5. Take a chance

And finally, don’t be afraid to go bold with colours. Years ago we were taught to not combine plaids and stripes, to not wear pink and purple together, and to stay away from bright colors if you didn’t want to attract attention.   But those rules certainly don’t work any more, especially in the garden.  So, take a chance!  Plant those vivid Volcano™ phlox next to bright orange daylilies; mix Black-eyed Susans with Purple Volcano Phlox and add a few spikes of strappy cordylines! Have fun, and happy planting!