How to decorate a flowerbed beautifully in the country?
Making a flower bed with your own hands makes it possible to make a flower garden that best suits your dreams and fantasies. It also helps to feel the plants, to understand their needs, to join the world of flora.
The initial stage of creating a flower arrangement is design, the correct arrangement of plants in a flower bed. They should not only look and match harmoniously, but also not interfere with each other. As a sample, you can use photos of beautifully decorated flower beds that fit the architectural structures located on the site.
The first step when decorating flower beds
The most important step in the design of flower beds is the correct selection of plant material. This takes into account:
- Climate and microclimate of the region... Some perennials are sensitive to spring frost and may die. Others can die during the winter, even if they are insulated. For example, flowers for flower beds in the Mediterranean style, or the Provence style;
- Site lighting: some ornamental plants cannot tolerate direct sunlight and are burned. Others, without direct sun, do not lay generative (flower) buds, and therefore do not bloom;
- Soil composition and acidity... Calceophilous plants that prefer pH above 7 will not be able to grow normally on acidic soils, and vice versa: cotton grass, heather, sundew, rhododendron do not tolerate alkaline soils;
- Abundance of rainfall and the possibility of regular watering... This is especially important for plants with large, but not fleshy leaves - they have a very large evaporation surface and therefore a large loss of water.
When decorating flower beds with your own hands, you can correct some factors, or make them more suitable for certain plants.
Stones or tiles next to the flower garden will increase the temperature in the flower bed by 3-5 degrees.
Plants that are afraid of direct sun can be planted in the company of larger light-loving representatives of the plant kingdom to protect them.
The structure and acidity of the soil can be changed by introducing these or those components.
Compost and sand will improve the condition of heavy substrates.
Organic matter will help enrich poor sandy soils, and lime will reduce acidity in acidified soils.
Decor and accessories when decorating a flower bed on the site
How to arrange a flower bed in front of the house so that it fits into the environment?
Add interesting touches to the floral arrangement. Often, it is the decorative details that give the flower garden a particular style. A positive point in the design of flower beds in the country is that old or unnecessary things can be used as auxiliary elements of the composition. Leaky buckets, wooden barrels, trolley wheels, old car or bicycle frames, clay pots, logs, driftwood, tree stumps and much more. As an element of a country-style flower bed, you can use a wooden fence, or the wall of a log house.
Decorating flower beds with stones - not aging classics
Stones can be distinguished as a separate element for decorating a flower bed. This material is so diverse in appearance, size and structure that it is suitable for decorating any flower bed.
Stones are used for:
- Creation of specific flower gardens - rock gardens and rockeries;
- Edging of beds of annual or perennial plants;
- Creating an interesting accent on the flower bed (for example, a rounded boulder covered with bright green moss);
- Contrast between smooth green living leaves, bright flowers and a rough gray or brown stone surface;
- Protecting the space between plants from weeds (use small stones, pebbles, gravel);
- Preservation of moisture in the soil and reduction of evaporation (similar to mulching);
- Decorating and creating designs from colored stones that complement the beauty of flowers (using gravel of different shades).
When decorating flower beds with stones, it must be borne in mind that perennials will grow. Large, beautiful boulders (called solo boulders) should not be too close to each other. Small stones, on the contrary, look more beautiful in groups.
What plants to choose when decorating flower beds
When choosing plants, you need to take into account not only the flowering period (spring, summer, autumn), but also the duration. To decorate flower beds in the country, it is advisable to use up to 50% of long-term flowering plants. That is, those in which, after some flowers wither, new buds develop on the same plant. For instance:
- repair roses;
- bloodroot;
- lavender;
- echinacea;
- chamomile;
- agastakhe;
- dahlias;
- coreopsis;
- yarrow.
These plants bloom from summer (June or July) to autumn or frost.