Review author: Terrari School of Design
Amateur summer residents often do not know how to beautifully decorate their garden plot.
There are a wide variety of options for decorating a site. One of these is the popular type of landscape design - flower bed.
Decorative flower beds (photo) look organic and very beautiful in personal plots; they also help to disguise unsightly areas on the territory. Almost everyone without exception likes delicate floral scents; they lift the mood and pleasantly please the eye.
Flowerbeds are given an original shape mainly so that they attract attention, being the visual center of the flower arrangement.
With the help of a flower bed, you can easily and simply eliminate all the protruding unevenness in the landscape with your own hands. The right design technique will allow you to design the territory in both horizontal and vertical formats. If the land for planting is not very good, unpretentious plants can be planted in flower beds.
Creating a flowerbed with your own hands will help to beautifully decorate the area around the country house, but only if the designers and the owners themselves have a clear idea of what they will do and how correctly everything can be decorated.
Material for flowerbed design
Before creating a flower bed, it is important to select the material to create its border. Properly selected decorative fences will make the garden more interesting and easier to care for. Due to the fencing, grass does not grow into flower beds, and soil does not fall onto lawns and paths.
Decorative fences can protect flowers from trampling and visually separate them from paths and lawns. In order for a decorative fence to become a good protection against unnecessary grass, it must be made in the ground at a depth of about 25 cm.
There are a lot of different materials for decorating fencing. In specialized stores you can purchase ready-made finishing options, such as:
- plastic strips, strips, and barriers
- concrete palisades
- wooden pegs
You can also adapt natural materials (stones, tree debris, branches) or give a second life to things that have gone out of use (pallets, old bricks).
Flower beds with wide edges look very impressive. They can be made using large stones, bricks, sleepers, and concrete slabs. You can create a fence from crushed stone or gravel.
To ensure that the edge remains invisible, thin strips of plastic or metal are made; they are simply hidden under a layer of garden bark and litter. The edges of the flower garden are decorated with flowers of low-growing varieties.
By separating the flowerbed, you can make fences from unnecessary used things:
- glass bottles
- cans
- bricks
- roof tiles
- car tires
Selection of plants
The basis of a colorful flower garden is properly selected plants. In order for the flower garden to have a more holistic appearance, you should select specimens whose flowering period is approximately the same. In this way, it will be possible to preserve the richness and unity of the created oasis for a long time.
As a rule, bright perennial plants are placed as the basis of the composition, and annual plants serve as an additional background. The advantage is that they can be changed every year and give the flower garden a new look.
But it is worth considering that with proper design, the color of plants should transition from one tone to another, thereby creating a gradient effect.
Additional decoration with your own hands will add more luxury to the flower bed. Stones, bricks, rubber tires, paving slabs, special plastic, metal or wooden fences can be used as decorative elements.
There are many options for using various available materials; you just need a little imagination and the site will acquire fabulous beauty. The main condition here is the combination of decor with a floral arrangement.
- Planting trees on the site
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Do not try to fit a large number of different plants in the flowerbed; it is better to divide them into several sections. A beautiful combination of colors with each other is much more important. The decoration after the period of mass flowering will be beautiful plants with unusual leaves or bright bracts; they will not let it fade.
Fencing made of large stones, boulders, concrete
Large natural stones are often used to decorate rocky gardens and flower beds. Large boulders look incredibly beautiful when enclosing a flower bed with tall flowers. Flowerbeds made of stones are easy to make yourself; they look very colorful.
The strongest and most resistant stone and concrete fences, they will last much longer than wood or plastic. They have excellent wear resistance and do not require constant maintenance. Concrete is a fairly durable material, excellent for creating edging in the form of low walls, strips that are flush with the ground.
Decorative fencing made of wooden pegs
For a summer cottage, a great idea would be to decorate a flower bed using wooden pegs. In summer cottages you can often find broken branches of trees, which are suitable for blocks with which you can make a flower garden fence.
Soil preparation
Warm spring days are the best time to plant and decorate a flower bed near the house. Initially, it is necessary to clean the selected area, removing all weeds with roots. If you plan to place it on a lawn or lawn, you must first remove the top layer of soil.
Afterwards, thoroughly saturate the soil with fertilizers and give it air. Garden forks are ideal for loosening. Through the process of aeration, you will not only distribute fertilizer throughout the area, but also create healthy soil with high fertility.
You can also increase its quality indicators with the help of sand or chernozem, depending on the characteristics and composition.
- Indoor ventilation
- Choosing grass for the lawn
- Deutzia is blooming - summer is coming
Wicker fence
A decorative wicker fence, woven with your own hands, will add originality to the garden and help save money - a fence created by yourself costs absolutely nothing.
It is best to weave a fence from a vine, but you can use other flexible branches left after cutting down trees and bushes. Birch decorative barriers look very expressive. The height of the wicker fence should be approximately 0.4-0.6 meters.
The base of the fence is made from long, thick branches of willow or grapevine. First of all, pegs are placed around the perimeter - in the corners and along the walls. A frame is woven between the pegs to create a fairly dense fence. Very long branches are trimmed. Secure the walls with corner clamps.
Wicker fences for flower beds are ideal for naturalistic and rustic gardens, perfect for decorative flower beds of roses, tall plants, and ornamental grasses.
Designing a site for ornamental plants
Every owner wants to make their summer cottage beautiful or tastefully decorate the yard of their home. It’s enough to look around to understand how to make a flowerbed with your own hands.
To do this, you don’t need to be a designer and incur large expenses. The easiest way is to arrange a flower garden in a geometric shape. Such an area is easy to fence off.
In fact, a beautiful flower bed can be created from any abandoned material. Old utensils, dry cut branches, unnecessary tires from a car and various items that have already served their intended purpose are used. When planning, keep in mind that long flower beds are placed along the fence or paths in the garden area.
Fashionable and original solutions for designing flower beds
Ordinary pots and flower beds can be revived and transformed with the help of unusual ideas. Decorative flower beds can be made from all kinds of available materials. For this you will need:
- tires
- old stumps,
- tree trunks
- old furniture
- old buckets and watering cans
- plastic bottles.
Shoes can become very fun flower pots; you just need to fill them with soil and plant flowers.
How to choose flowers for a flower bed at the dacha?
Having decided on the optimal place to create a flower garden, you need to choose plants that are ideal for realizing the idea. Everything is important here:
- time and duration of flowering,
- plant height,
- color spectrum,
- smell of flowers,
- even care features.
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It is also necessary to take into account what kind of plant you have chosen - an annual one or a design with flowers of perennial flower beds, its resistance to hot and cold weather, to excess or lack of water. Some plants cannot be planted in close proximity to each other - such nuances, as a rule, become noticeable only after the plants gain color.
Spilled flowers
The popular design trend “spill flowers” has come to us. The flowers seemed to spill out of an overturned vessel. This design looks incredibly beautiful. This wonderful idea will decorate any garden. This could be a flat area, an area near a pond, or an alpine hill.
In the latter option, you can create a beautiful composition when a stream of flowers cascades down like a waterfall. You can use absolutely any vessel as a container. This can be not only an ordinary flower pot, but also a milk can or an old bucket.
The color palette is also varied and depends on the main landscape. White, yellow, pink flowers will look great on a lush bright green carpet. If the substrate is soil, gravel, or tree bark, you can choose options with darker colors: blue, purple, bright orange, burgundy.
What is important here is not the type of container, but the well-chosen flowers that “pouring” from it. Of course, these should be dense, low-growing plants for a flower bed. But a combination of simple low flowers also looks good: marigolds, petunias, primroses, pansies.
First steps. Size and shape
The main difference between a flower bed and a flower garden is its shape. If a flower garden can have absolutely any shape you want, then the flower bed is made only in strict geometric configurations (circle, oval, rectangle, square). This may be any geometric figure, but with smooth and clear contours.
Flowerbeds with a distinct geometry look more attractive on a flat, well-groomed lawn. It is worth noting that the shape of the flower bed should be visible from each side, otherwise it will look sloppy.
In order to prevent such a situation, it is recommended to pay attention to two important points.
The first is a diagram of the future composition. The process of creating it is quite simple; it is necessary to draw the outline of the planned object on the prepared area.
The second point is the density of planting. Here you should take into account their growth characteristics when using several different varieties. For example, planting identical plants must be done according to the “carpet” principle, placed extremely close to each other.
If there are empty areas among the flowers, this will ruin all the effectiveness and spoil the geometric integrity. Options for beautifully designing a flowerbed like a “carpet” can be seen in the photo.
The dimensions and shape of the future flower bed completely depend on the size of the site itself. If there is an opportunity to create a large front garden, then it is worth taking advantage of it. After all, massive flower arrangements have a more attractive appearance in contrast to small islands.
If you are not an experienced gardener, then as a first experience, make it simple in shape with a simple design.
Vertical flower bed from a pallet
In small gardens and loggias there is not much space, so you need to carefully plan the surface and choose the best solutions that will help you place more details while taking up less space. A vertical flower bed will allow you to plant many plants in a small area.
Old tires can be used to create raised beds - you just need to connect a few tires together. Old car tires filled with soil and flowers are probably the most common type of flower bed in dachas. Tires can be painted in bright colors, applied with an ornament or an interesting pattern, and hung on the wall.
Almost any of the presented materials can be used in several ways. The only limitation is the imagination of the owners of personal plots. It is important not to “overdo it” in such ingenuity and preserve the main task of the fence (fencing): to limit the surface of the flowerbed.
It often happens that for the sake of beauty, practicality is neglected and the decorative fence quickly becomes unusable. Therefore, it is better to use reliable, time-tested methods. A rim with uneven edges can create a risk of injury; unstable materials will quickly fail.
The result will be additional, unnecessary work, wasted time. Still, creating a flower bed is not like building a house, and anyone who has the desire can do it with their own hands, using these simple tips.
