Creating Perennial Border

Tips on Creating Perennial Border
and Choosing Perennial Border Plants

One of the finest ways that you can use perennials is when you are thinking of adding well defined and beautiful perennial borders to your flower beds, or even as 'outlines' to your garden landscape.

Remember to cover all the crucial aspects well in advance – to create a beautiful garden, planning is everything. So remember that you must prepare your soil correctly, then choose the colors carefully – this is especially crucial, so pay special attention choosing the colours of your plants and flowers.

Try to visualize what the blooming plants will look like in relation to the colours of the other plants around them. Think a in terms of the general color scheme you want in your garden, both of the border plants, and of the whole garden.

Spend some thought on patterns and on composition of your beautiful perennial borders – where you will place which species. In general, you should place the taller species behind the smaller ones – this is, of course, to follow the most common viewpoint of an observer. Most observers will generally be walking through the garden, or sitting and relaxing in a specific area of it.

And of course you should spend some effort on considering the flowering periods. Consider that not only do you want the plants in your garden look beautiful together, but also so that the garden is never or rarely without flowers. If you plan it right you can have the plants flowering at different times to ensure there is always some colour from the flowers, without which any garden can look bleak and listless.

Now we'll cover some of the above points regarding creating perennial border in a bit more detail.

One of the most important aspects of ensuring that your garden is beautiful and healthy is preparing the soil correctly.

Do not 'import' soil – soil that comes from outside your garden can contain seeds of hostile and aggressive weeds that could easily over run your garden, and either stifle your garden plants or at the very least leach nutrients from them and lessen their foliage or blooms. And of course weeds mean hours of back breaking labor spent in ridding your garden of them. So instead of bringing in soil, go in for manure or compost, adding it to the soil in requisite quantities to ensure that your perennial border plants and the rest of the plants as well are always healthy.

Now, once the ground is prepared, the next step of creating perennial border is you have to consider what you are going to put in it.

Generally speaking a nice way to plan a garden is by looking at existing pictures of gardens that you like, or looking through some gardening books and magazines. Pictures of other garden designs will give you an idea of just what sort of effect you are going to create or end up with.

There are also certain rules of thumb that you can follow to ensure that your garden looks exactly as you want it to look.

One thing you can do to ensure that a border isn't to bold is to use softer colors for it. Soft colours will blend and merge with the overall appearance rather than stand out.

On the other hand, for a bold and clear outline for creating perennial border, use brightly colored blossoms. If you can imagine using a border of brighly coloured flowers, it will stand out more as a clearly defined edge.

Now there are three forms to the composition of any garden landscape.

The first of these is rhythm. Rhythm is achieved by mixing various plant textures. Remember when you do this that there must be variations not only in the size and shape of various groups of flowers, but also in their height.

Then you can create an effect of harmony by using flowers of different types, but which happen to be of the same shade of colour.

And finally there is repetition, which ensures that the eye of an observer flows from one area of your landscape to another.

Back to Shade Gardens Ideas and Plan