Using Flowers To Your Advantage

M1 lives in and serves Southern California, the land of the sun and stars! And when it comes to your gardens, there are no bigger divas than your flowers. They light up your landscape and bring joy to your home. But if you plant a few, leave them, and forget them, you’re not getting all you can from your gardens. There’s a lot to know and do with flower design. So today, we will share some of our favorite ways to use flowers to brighten your yard.

You Were Great, But We’re Looking for Someone Taller

Flowers come in all shapes and sizes, so if you plant them all in the ground in a neat row, you might not get all you can from them. Landscaping is all about contrast, so we like to create surprises when designing your flower beds. One of the primary principles in flower design is height differences.

Shining at the Box Office

While you can use flowers naturally at different heights to create contrast, you can also build them up on your own, creating vertical interest with constructed gardens. That can be as simple as a raised bed a foot off the ground or as elaborate as a multi-tiered retaining wall.

Flowering Shrubs Aren’t Just Supporting Players

Here’s another way to use height to provide contrast and surprise in your flower design. Add flowering shrubs! Shrubs are a relatively low-maintenance addition to your landscape.

In Technicolor!

Of course, one of the primary flower factors that attract us is the vivid colors. However, you can use color differently depending on your style and home’s aesthetic. You may choose to add different shades of one color or complementary colors in a particular area of your yard. Or you can surprise with contrasting colors. All these choices can work well when designed and installed correctly.

We Need the It Factor

Another element of landscape design that can be (ironically) hard to put your finger on is texture. Texture, in terms of your flowers, is not necessarily the way they feel in your hand but the perceived feel of them based on their shape. Found-petaled daisies have a different texture than smooth, elegant roses. And both contrast with spiky decorative grasses, which segues nicely into our next section.

Don’t Neglect the Below-the-Line Crew

As crucial as your flowers are to your design, it’s a team effort. Mulching your flower beds helps keep out weeds and retains moisture, creating a contrast for your flowers. You can use the same principles here that you use for your flowers.

Lights, Camera, Action!

Landscape lighting is a fun way to use your flowers creatively and differently. Any cinematographer or director of photography will tell you that lighting can make or break a shot and change the mood of an entire picture. So if you’re only enjoying your flowers during the day, you’re missing out! You can create a new mood in the evening with the right lighting scheme. You may even choose to feature different flowers that don’t have the chance to shine during the day. A moon garden is one example. In moon gardens, homeowners group paler flowers and use lighting or natural moonlight to create a beautiful feel.

Staying Power or 15 Minutes?

One way to enjoy your flowers all year with less effort is to landscape with a mix of annuals and perennials. If you have perennials you love, they can anchor your gardens and come back every year. Then you can provide variety by changing the annuals that last only a season to create a new aesthetic.

Let M1 Produce Your Perfect Flower Design

As with filmmaking, a lot can go wrong in flower bed design, but when you have a master creator, you can create something beautiful. So let M1 produce the flower design of your dreams for your landscape. Just call and tell us your ideas, and we’ll roll in 3, 2, M1.