Flower Gardening Tips For Beginners 

Flower gardening tips to turn your garden into a colorful oasis for humans, bees and other garden wildlife.

Can you imagine a garden without flowers? Not really...it would be a pretty boring and depressing place! A garden has to have some form of flowers and we all love them! They add color to our lives and we love to bring them into our homes as cut flowers or potted flowers to cheer us up.

Garden flowers are available in many different forms, shapes, and colors. There is one available for any situation in your garden whether is a shaded spot that receives no direct sunlight or a dry flower bed baked by the sun every day. 

How To Choose The Best Flowers For Your Garden

Garden centers and plant catalogs are always tempting us gardeners with beautiful irresistible plants and flowers. They look so pretty...you just have to buy them. We have all been there and done that! You plant them somewhere in your flower beds...and a few days later they start looking a bit sad...and then they give up. What went wrong? 

More than likely you just picked the wrong plant for your situation! 

To be successful with flower gardening you have to assess the situation to pick the right plants. To match the conditions of the natural habitat of the plant with the conditions in your garden you have to get some information about it. Most plant labels will give you the basic info or you can read up about them online. For good advice on suitable plants ask at your local garden center or savvy gardeners in your neighborhood.   

Here are some questions you have to ask yourself before you go plant shopping:

• is it a sunny spot or full shade?
• how many hours a day of sun does it receive?
• What is your soil like? Is it heavy, sandy or loamy soil? 
• Is it wet, well-drained or dry soil?
• Is it sheltered or exposed to cold winds?

Flower Gardening Tips For Bees And Other Pollinators

Flowers can fulfill more than one purpose in your garden. In a natural garden, they should not only be there to look pretty. Flowers can provide nectar, pollen, and habitat for bees, insects, butterflies, and other pollinators. They can make a valuable contribution to the biodiversity of your garden and will help to attract beneficial insects to your garden. Here are a few examples of flowering plants that are pretty as well as beneficial for bees and other insects:

Annual Or Perennial Flowers?

It is always good to know if a plant is annual (only growing for one season) or perennial (growing for several years). 

You might be asking yourself what is better? There is no simple answer to this and most gardeners will grow both of them. The benefit of most annuals like e.g. Alyssum, Lobelia or Bizzy Lizzy is that they flower non-stop all summer long. They add a great splash of color to your flower beds and containers. The downside is that they have to be replanted every year. 

Herbaceous perennials will grow for many years and can often be divided and multiplied once they have reached sufficient size. Good examples for flowering perennial plants are Rudbeckias, Lilies, Arum Lilies, Carnations, Lupins, Hardy Geraniums, Bleeding Heart, Columbine or Lavender. Most perennial flowers won't be in bloom for the whole summer. Their flowering period is usually shorter compared to annuals.

More Flower Gardening Tips

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