It is hard to believe anything could be more beautiful than the spring flowers in local gardens.
Cascades of daffodils, tulips, pansies and other striking flowers have painted a stunning panorama of color.
Sadly, it all comes to an end. The spring beauty is fleeting, and the heat will soon take its toll. Petals on the tulips fall, daffodils fade and pansies lose their luster.
Fortunately, the summer blooming annuals and perennials are standing in the wings.
Drive down the street and you can see flowers in almost any garden. What sets apart the stunning from the ordinary is planning. Ordinary gardens have flowers, the best put on a show.
Exciting gardens are dynamic and create beauty as they change each week. Think of the pistons on a gasoline engine. If all of the pistons are up or all of them are down at the same time, the engine will not run.
Likewise, beautiful gardens have flowers that come up and go down in sequence at various stages in the season.
If all your garden flowers are the same height, the same color, the same texture and planted in predictable patterns, the flower beds are boring.
As beautiful as the individual blossoms might be, they always are more attractive if planted with other blossoms in a pleasing design.
The book "Temple Square Gardening" describes four basic elements of designing flower beds by relating them to parts of your body. The four elements are:
skeletal flowers,
tendon flowers,
flesh flowers,
and sparkle flowers.
Start first by selecting a pleasing skyline — or skeleton — for the garden. If all the flowers are the same height, the flower bed won't be very exciting.
Select tall flowers to start. If tall flowers won't fit in your design, you can select dominant flowers that have a large spread, those with large or coarse-textured leaves or those with bright colors. These dominant flowers should comprise 10 percent to 20 percent of the flowers in your beds.
Look for flowers such as amaranth (or Joseph's coat), snapdragon, canna, cleome (or spider flower), cosmos, exhibition dahlias, snow-on-the-mountain, sunflower, nicotiana (or flowering tobacco) and tall forms ofpPenstemon or beards-tongue, salvia, marigold and zinnia.
These are only a few plants that grow well in Utah in sunny locations, and the above suggestions — and following suggestions — are not meant to be a complete list. I'll cover flowers for shade gardens later.
The next 10 percent to 20 percent of your flowers is connecting — or tendon — flowers. These are not as tall, the plant colors are not as bright, the leaves are not as coarse-textured or as large. Place these near the more dominant flowers but at angles or offset from the first group.
Smaller forms or less dominant textures or colors of the previously mentioned flowers qualify, as do calendula (pot marigold), ornamental pepper, celosia, larkspur, lavatera, eustoma (lisianthus), four-o'clock, bells of Ireland, ornamental basil, pelargonium (garden geranium), dusty miller and Mexican sunflower.
The bulk of the flowers in the garden are not as dominant in height, color, texture or garden position, but they are the most numerous and comprise 60 percent to 80 percent of the flowers in the design. These form the flesh — or filler plants — in the flower bed.
Choose from ageratum (floss flower), bidens, vinca (periwinkle), celosia, gazania, lobelia, alyssum, petunia, moss rose (portulaca), creeping zinnia and narrow-leaf zinnia or nasturtium.
I compare the final group of flowers to some fine jewelry — the sparkle flowers. These highly contrasting flowers set off the rest of the design because of their unusual color, much the same way as jewelry sets of the rest of a fashion ensemble.
This last group of flowers is the smallest group and comprises about 5 percent of the total number of flowers in the bed. Choose these after selecting the others, so you can get the contrast you need.
None of the flowers I listed are assigned to the above groups in a specific list. What group a plant fits into depends on how you use it and what other plants are included in a design.
A specific flower might be dominant in one bed, connecting in another and flesh or sparkle in another.
While there are four groups of flowers, that does not mean that we only have four kinds of flowers in the garden. Try to include 15-30 types of flowers in a good-size garden. When gardeners first hear this, they are taken aback, but put this into perspective.
For design purposes, different colors, sizes and textures of the same kind of flower count as a different kind of flower. As an example, tall, medium and short impatiens would count as three kinds. If you had three colors, it would give you nine kinds. So having 15-30 types is not all that daunting.
Larry A. Sagers is a horticulture specialist for the Utah State University Extension Service at Thanksgiving Point.