Brighten Up Your Flower Garden For Springtime!

Flowers in The Garden

Springtime is here; a time to start gardening and spruce up your garden. Below I share a few ideas to give your garden a spring-time makeover with snowdrops, tulips, daffodils, narcissism, crocuses, bluebells, shrubs and trees.
Gardens are used for a variety of activities; planting vegetables, playing football, having fun on the swings or cooking a barbie, but to me it is a place to display an array of beautiful flowers. So as the weather warms up and the last remnants of winter and the dreaded frost have gone, I burst into the garden armed with gloves, trowel, potted plants and seeds ready to bring my garden back to life with pastel shades of yellow, magnolia trees, tulips and daffodils.
Come with me and and let's do some gardening.

 How to Brighten Up Your Garden

1. Walk into your garden and take photos of how it is laid out. This will help you create a mental picture of where you would like to place certain flowers, shrubs and trees, and where you want to display particular colors. For example you could brighten up a dull corner with a dazzling display of Golden Mammoth (yellow) crocuses or design a floral bed of delicate pastels.
2. From the picture you took sketch your basic layout. Start by measuring your garden's boundaries and sketch them out as a rough plan using graph paper and a pencil.
3. It is essential that you choose the right bulbs to suit your garden's conditions. It is known that most bulbs grow and survive in dry, sunny places with good drainage so as to prevent rotting. However, that's not the case for woodland bulbs such as bluebells and snowdrops which requires damp moist conditions.
4. Plant a formal border with flowering shrubs like the rhododendron, azaleas, or Haleakala Carolina. It is recommended that you choose a maximum of three colors to capture the best visual effect, any more than that will make the border too colorful and unattractive.
5) For a natural look to your the lawn add pretty white and yellow lawn flowers. Using a bulb planter dig out a plug and plant the bulb in, patting the plug back into place. The type of bulbs for this natural effect are:

• Chamomile
• Primrose
• Wild Cowslip
• Whit Clover
  

6. Purchase clay, terracotta or alabaster pots, fill with flower seeds or bulbs and place in strategic places in your garden. You can also surround the pot and top the soil with multi colored gravel. This not only looks great but it is fantastic as additional drainage.

7. If you want to create a feature you could purchase a wheel barrow, paint it white and plant your favorite flowers directly in the wheel barrow. Place the wheel barrow in a sunny part of the garden.

8. Buy a trellis and attach silver cone shaped pots at angles with green foliage draping whispering from the pots along the trellis.



9. Put up a mini picket fence. They look so pretty protecting the flowerbeds and gives a cottage feel to the garden.

Spring Gardening

If you dream of a garden with an immaculate lawn, border perennials, and shimmering spring flowers in full bloom then, no doubt, you would have planted your bulbs back in early November right?. The majority of early spring flowers are grown from bulbs planted in the winter, the Snowdrop, Snowflake, Crocus, Tulips and Daffodils are examples of hardy bulbs with spring flowering.
However, if you were not able to plant any bulbs last winter you can still transform and brighten up your flower garden through planting potted tubers or rooted cuttings, which should be planted out as soon as spring has arrived. When planting your tubers/bulbs ensure that you dig a hole at least 9ins deep so as to prevent them drying out.