Flower Beds

A flower garden is a garden that is most often grown for decorative purposes. Because flowers will bloom at different times throughout the year, and some plants are annual, dying each winter, the designs and styles of flower gardens are limited only by your imagination and space. You can design to keep specific color combinations consistent throughout the growing seasons. Flower gardens are delightful way to combine flowers of different heights, colors, textures, and scents to createa wonderful experience for the senses.

Flowerbeds have grown in design and complexity over the decades adding form as well as function. Asthetically pleasing designs like knot gardens or herb gardens are very popular. Many herbs also have a decorative function, such as those used in incenses and perfumes. And some of the “decorative” flowers are quite edible.

Now there is available on the market and it is growing in popularity, is the pre-made "wildflower" seed mix. These assortments of seeds will create a bed that contains flowers that will bloom in various parts of the growing seasons, so that there will always be some flowers in bloom. The best mixtures will include perennials and biennials, which may not bloom until the following year, and annuals which "self-seed", so they willgrow year after year creating a nearly “instant” flowerbed.

Another recent trend is the "flower garden in a box". These kits are pre-packaged with separate packs of different flowers, and have a sort of pattern that you lay down on the area to be used as the garden and then you sow the seeds in the designated areas.

Most of the plants that are now considered decorative flowers were once thought of as weeds. Farmers, because of their beauty, would tolerate some of these “weeds” and this led to a selection process, and the cultivation of certain flowers. This type of gardening has been around for as long as mankind has roamed the planet and had civilization. Perhaps this is why many flowers function as decorative and food plants. Perhaps they had evolved a relationship with the food plants before either was domesticated making themselves convenient to be selected as an attractive plant.

Once these once wild plants were domesticated, most flowers were grown separately or as part of the food gardens having some other primary function…such as uses in tictures, and other types of herbla medicines. In the West, the idea of gardens dedicated to only flowers was rather rare until the 19th century. Today many modern gardens are flower gardens.

Flower gardens are a key factor in today’s modern landscape design as well as architecture. This is quite true for large businesses. Many companies pay to have the large flower gardens torn out and replaced each season just to make sure that the colors and blooms are always bright and vibrant and attractive to the clientele and giving the office grounds a polished and attractive look.