A Prairie Garden Journal    by Dick Meyer

Bigger, Bolder, Brighter, Better
and Back In The Landscape

One of the pleasures of springtime for many gardeners is the trek to garden centers to see “what’s new”.  It has become an annual pilgrimage for avid gardeners eagerly anticipating the opportunity to mix “new and improved” with “tried and true” to create colorful summertime decks, patios, entry gardens, and landscapes.  What has become a truly worldwide flower industry rarely disappoints with what is always a longer list of “new and improved” than any one garden center can hope to grow and sell. 

For almost 20 years there has been a trend for the so-called annual flowers to move out of the flowers beds and landscapes and into the containers, hanging baskets, and window boxes that have become so prevalent in contemporary residential landscapes.  And there is little doubt that the trend of container gardening is here to stay.  For apartment dwellers and those living in large residential developments where the grounds are maintained by a homeowners association, container gardens are often the only opportunity available for “gardening”
 

You may want to remember the three rules of real estate when figuring out where to place one of the “new and improved” annual flower beds—location, location, and location.  These are likely to be visually strong flower beds, so locate them where you can see and enjoy  them.  Near the entry to your home or near backyard leisure areas like decks and patios are logical places to locate one of these new annual flower beds.

Previous Articles

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It's Finally Spring -  March 13

Spring Garden Calendar-March 20

No Garden Left Behind-March 27

Planting Trees for a Cooler Earth in a Warmer WyoBraska-April 3

Viburnums - Shrubs for Wyobraska Springs-April 10

Want A Water Conserving Lawn? You might already have one-
April 17

Creating Long Term
Tree-lationships April 24

Bigger, Bolder, Brighter,
Better—and Back In The Landscape May 01 & 08

2007 Articles

2006 Articles

The desire for low maintenance landscapes was a big part of what caused so many homeowners to give up on their traditional flower beds in favor of the easier-to-care-for container gardens.  The annual flowers were replaced by lower-maintenance perennials and ornamental grasses, in what turned out to be a win-win situation for most homeowners.  They got the low-maintenance landscape they where hoping for  with the perennials, plus much more colorful outdoor living spaces with containers filled with each new summer’s crop of bigger, bolder, brighter, and better annuals. 

But in an interesting twist, it now appears that annual flowers are beginning to move back into traditional flower beds and landscape settings.   What’s seems to be motivating this change is the desire on the part of homeowners to get the now greatly enhanced visual impact of the new annual flowers out into the “in-ground” landscape.  It’s a good trend, I think, for several reasons.

First, the use of mulch and drip irrigation has greatly reduced the time required to maintain annual flowers planted out in the landscape.  This is a big change.  Watering and weeding have always been the time consuming aspects of maintaining flower beds.  With those chores reduced to a few minutes a week to pull the few weeds that make it through the mulch, maintaining annuals flowers in the landscape can require even less time than maintaining container gardens. 

Second, one of the recent trends in annuals is that they have become much more than just flowers.  Almost all avid gardeners now include a variety of foliage plants in their containers, and it is not at all unusual to see containers which contain no flowers at all—only combinations of plants with strikingly colored and textured foliage. 

One last suggestion is to keep your new annual flower bed small—at least to begin with.  There’s no rule that says you can’t create a big and beautiful flower bed with the new high impact annuals, but because they have such high visual impact you don’t need a large planting area in order to create a very showy flower bed.  In fact, just pretend that you have buried one of your large flower pots right up to its rim out in your landscape and are now filling it with flowers just as if it were still sitting on your patio.  You may want to give each plant a little more room than you do when planting it in a container, but that is not absolutely necessary.  It’s probably a good idea to use a good slow-release fertilizer when you plant, and perhaps to add a little more mid-summer. 

Here’s some of the “new and improved” annuals you will be seeing in garden centers this year.

The Star-Herald ran a previous
Prairie Garden Journal which can be found at
Thrillers, Chillers and Spillers