A Complete Guide to Year-Round Colour in Your Garden
A garden that remains colourful all year round isn’t based on luck, but rather strategic planting and careful garden design.
While your landscape may look amazing during the blooming seasons of the year, maintaining this momentum as the weather changes requires considerate planting. It is possible to have a garden that remains vibrant and attractive all year round; it requires a little more planning.
As leading landscape gardeners, Taming Mother Nature knows what it takes for gardens to thrive year-round. We help clients design, build and maintain their outdoor spaces to ensure lasting results.
In this post, we are sharing how you can design a garden for year-round colour and the skills required to maintain this vibrancy throughout the seasons.
Planning For A Four-Season Garden: How To Achieve Year-Round Colour
Before buying any plants or even thinking about picking up the shovel, you need to understand how your garden behaves. While most people are aware that their garden goes through different cycles as the year progresses, understanding what happens within each of these and how it can impact your garden design is essential to ensure year-round colour.
Along with the universal seasonal changes, there will be specific conditions within your garden that need attention. This is why all garden design and landscaping projects begin with a site consultation. During a consultation, professional landscapers will learn more about your ideas for the renovation, as well as assess your current garden to determine factors such as sun exposure patterns, shade and soil conditions.
To ensure you are working with the right landscapers for the job, see our post on Questions To Ask Professional Landscapers In Surrey.
The conditions of your landscape can vary based on the time of year, and understanding the changes your unique garden goes through will make it easier to plan for year-round colour. You will be able to plan successful planting displays based on the natural conditions of your garden, ensuring each flower, shrub or tree is placed in a supportive environment for year-round colour.
As well as understanding the specific conditions of your landscape, you also need to understand the universal seasonal changes that can influence your gardening.
Each season creates a new environment, based on temperature, moisture and light which can influence the kind of plants that will thrive. For year-round colour in your garden, you need to be able to find plants that can align with and thrive in these varying conditions.
As a general guide:
- Spring: In spring, the soil begins to warm up and daylight hours increase, giving certain flowers and plants more supportive environments. Focus on bulbs and early bloomers, which require the warmer temperatures to thrive but can establish well in the moist soil that remains following winter.
- Summer: A naturally vibrant season, summer is often filled with colourful blooms and fragrant plants, giving you plenty of options for year-round colour at this time. The longer, sunnier days create the ideal environment for a range of pollinator-friendly flowers, creating a garden that is full of colour and movement.
- Autumn: As the nights begin to cool and daylight hours decrease, autumn can still be a fruitful time for your garden with the right planting options. Hardier plants are required during this season to accommodate the cold, damp temperatures, along with late bloomers and colourful foliage.
- Winter: While many plants enter their dormant phase during the winter, due to the cold, dark days and frosty temperatures, there are still options to maintain year-round colour.
To learn more about seasonal planting and the unique conditions of the region, see our Seasonal Planting Made Simple post here.
What To Plant For Year-Round Colour
With these seasonal conditions, and an understanding of how your garden operates, you can begin to design a layout for year-round colour. To ensure that your garden remains vibrant and attractive throughout the year, you need to use a combination of planting types.
Using various plant types is the only way to guarantee year-round colour in your garden, as they will bloom at different times. Layered planting displays like this ensure that there is always something happening in your garden, preventing bare spots and prolonging visual appeal.
The best way to create a layered planting display for year-round colour is to include a combination of species, such as:
Annuals: Instant Colour And Seasonal Spurts
Annuals complete their full life cycle, from seed to full bloom, in one season, which is why they are staples in many planting displays. Using these for year-round colours creates instant visual appeal and ensures vibrant displays at specific times of the year.
As they complete their life cycle within a season, annuals cannot be used alone for year-round colour, but can add depth and interest to your garden at different points in the year. Annuals can bloom at various times of the year, allowing you to add a pop of colour into your landscape throughout the seasons, whether this is filling a gap, creating a new display or simply adding more colour to your vibrant space.
To create year-round colour with annuals, consider:
- Warm-season Annuals: If planting during the spring and summer, rely on flowers such as petunias, marigolds, begonias and lobelias for lush colour in flower beds and borders. For more ideas of what to plant in summer, read our Summer Planting Guide.
- Cold-tolerant Annuals: Annuals such as pansies, violas, and cyclamen can provide vibrancy in the colder months of the year, filling in gaps within planting borders or prolonging the appeal of your flower beds.
Biennials: Two-Year Bloomers And Longer Displays
A great complement or alternative to annuals is biennials, which can provide two years of colour in your garden. In the first year, biennials will grow foliage, adding structure and greenery to the garden, and bloom in their second year for additional colour.
With their longer-lasting appeal, biennials are a great transition plant within your garden and can be used to complement other flowers, shrubs or plants already in the garden. Ideal for borders, flower beds or even containers, biennials can support year-round colour and prolong the visual appeal of your space.
Some of the best biennials for year-round colour include:
- Foxgloves: These tall, tubular flowers in white, pink or purple add height and drama to your borders, and attract pollinators like bees during the spring and summer. If you are looking to attract pollinators in your garden, get more inspiration with this guide.
- Hollyhocks: With large, tall stems and colourful disc-shaped flowers in shades of yellow, white, and red, these biennials add a classical touch to planting areas.
- Sweet William: These compact clusters of vibrant blooms in reds, pinks and whites are ideal for garden borders or container planting.
- Forget-me-nots: A low-growing biennial with delicate blue flowers that can fill in the gaps of planting displays and borders during the spring.
Perennials: The Foundation of Year-Round Colour
Perennials return to your garden year after year, making them the perfect foundation for year-round colour. They will be a staple within your garden design, evolving gracefully throughout the year and returning with bright blooms. Many perennials also provide structure with their foliage, which remains even when the flowers begin to fade.
These perennials can be used in borders, flower beds, and containers for year-round colour, and a combination can ensure lasting appeal:
- Spring Perennials: Classic spring perennials such as hellebores, primroses, and peonies are a great way to start the gardening year off right with vibrancy.
- Summer Perennials: Summer flowers such as Echinacea, lavender, delphiniums and salvias keep your garden attractive and colourful as the seasons progress, as they thrive under full sun.
- Autumn Perennials: Asters, sedum and Rudbeckia extend colour and visual interest in your garden throughout the cooler seasons, and will return to do the same year after year.
Evergreen Shrubs: Year-Round Colour And Structure
Evergreens are essential for year-round colour, as they prevent your garden from falling flat when the rest of the plants and flowers have faded. Unlike many other species, such as deciduous trees and shrubs, evergreens keep their foliage all year round. They provide lasting structure, texture and colour to your garden, remaining a staple within your garden design throughout the seasons.
There are options for both flowering and simple foliage evergreens, ensuring you can add year-round colour to your landscape, no matter the theme or intended design:
- Flowering Evergreens: Shrubs such as camellias, rhododendrons, and heathers offer colour and form in cooler months, but produce beautifully colourful flowers in the spring and summer.
- Foliage Evergreens: These are the traditional options for shrubs, offering lasting foliage and texture to your outdoor space. Shrubs such as boxwood, holly, yew and laurel make excellent hedging, privacy screens or backdrop planting. For more ideas regarding privacy screening and garden shelters, check out this guide.
Conclusion
To create a garden that looks great all year round, planting needs to be used strategically. Not only does the layout of your garden need to be considered, but the kind of plants used throughout it. Plants are a wonderful adornment in your garden and can complement all kinds of outdoor spaces.
From flower beds to borders, raised planters and containers, it is possible to ensure year-round colour in your landscape by using a range of species. Including a combination of annuals, perennials, biennials and evergreens in your garden will maintain the visual appeal of your space throughout the seasons and ensure there are no dry spells in your garden design.
As a leading landscaping company, Taming Mother Nature provides professional services to support your garden throughout the year. Whether you are looking to add year-round colour, improve paving, or maintain your current landscape standards, we are here to help.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How can I make my garden colourful all year round?
The key to year-round colour in the garden is using a combination of plant types, each offering its own flowering and foliage periods. For example, mix spring flowering annuals with late-blooming perennials and evergreen shrubs to ensure lasting, colourful displays.
What plants are the easiest to maintain for year-round colour?
Some of the best plants for low-maintenance colour include lavender, sedum, and hardy geraniums. You can also consider evergreens like box, holly, or laurel for their long-lasting appeal.
When is the best time to plant for year-round colour?
Autumn and spring are the best planting seasons, as the soil is easy to work with and the temperatures are mild, making it easy for plants, bulbs and shrubs to establish.