5 Tips For Planting A Colorful Garden

Hey friends! 🙂 Spring has arrived in full force and it’s time to start thinking about planting the garden! 🙂 I’ve teamed up with Monrovia Plants to bring you these 5 tips to help you plant a gorgeous garden that pops in color!

1. Know the area in your garden you want to plant before buying plants.

Learning a little bit about the area in your garden where you want to plant before you head out to the store will save you a ton of frustration later on. A few questions you want to ask yourself before you go plant shopping are:

• How many hours of sun does this area get per day?
• Is this area easy to water?
• How can I keep color in this area for as much of the year as possible in my climate?

If you are new to gardening in the area you live in, you’ll also want to consider your plant hardiness zone. This will tell you what plants will grow well in your area. I live in Northern California and I live in plant hardiness zone 9. To find the plant hardiness zone for your area, visit the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map. 

The picture below is on the eastern side of my home. The plants on either size of the area start growing their leaves back in late spring and bloom in mid summer, so this area looks especially bare this time of year. And as cute as the fairy statue is, it just doesn’t fill the area up. 🙂 This area gets 6+ hours of sunlight a day and it is in an easy area to water.

I decided I wanted to plant a colorful bush with year-round foliage to fill up the area next to the deck, then plant a couple of smaller flowering plants in front that bloom in early spring to give this area as much year-round color as possible. Which brings us to my second tip:

2. Plant to have as much year-round color as possible.

The biggest mistake I made as a newbie gardener was not planting to have as much year-round color in my garden as possible, which resulted in a lot of bare areas in my garden at certain times of the year. I’ve rectified the situation over the years, but I still have a couple of areas I need to replant like the one pictured above.

One of the many great things about Monrovia Plants is that all their plants come with an at-a-glance information card like the one pictured below. I can see everything I need to know about the particular plant, so I will know if it will work in the area of my garden that I’m shopping for. I can see that the Emerald ‘N Gold Wintercreeper pictured above will get big enough (but not too big) to fill in the area next to my deck. It also has year-round interest, which means it will look good in the winter months. 

The plants I purchased to fill in the area in front of the Wintercreeper are Blue Eyed Beauty African Daisy and Blue Star Lithodora. They both bloom during the spring and summer, and since the plants around them bloom from mid to late summer, they are a great choice to fill in the gap for springtime.

3. Lay out all your plants in your garden area before you plant them.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but I can’t tell you how many times I started planting without laying all the plants out first, just to realize that I either planted some in the wrong spot (like planting shorter plants behind taller plants) or that I didn’t have enough room left to plant them all. Lay out all your plants in their containers so you will know in advance if you’re going to be happy with the layout. This is a lot easier to do then realizing that you messed up after the fact and then have to dig up the plants and replant them. This will also help a lot with the next two tips:

4. Mix plant textures and flower colors for added interest.

Another one of my mistakes as a newbie gardener was planting plants with the same flower color all in one area. I’m not saying this is a bad thing if you plan to do it that way, but when I did it, it wasn’t a planned thing. Purple is my favorite color, so whenever I went plant shopping I would naturally gravitate towards the purple-flowering plants. Pretty soon I had a garden full of purple flowers and not much else! Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but when I started mixing in other colors with the purple, I liked it a lot better.

5. Space out plants to allow for growth.

Yet another one of my mistakes as a newbie gardener was to plant my plants like they were never going to get any bigger. They looked great at first, but once they started growing, it was a leafy nightmare! I spent a lot of time digging for some plants that were covered by the overgrowth of other plants in the hopes I could save and replant them.

The takeaway here is that all plants start out small, but most of them don’t stay small. Remember to check the handy at-a-glance tag on your Monrovia Plants and space them out accordingly!

I hope you enjoyed my 5 tips for planting a colorful garden with Monrovia Plants! 

• Be sure to check out their online store to purchase Monrovia Plants for your garden!
• Stop by their Grow Beautifully homepage for a ton of gardening inspiration!

Happy planting! 🙂

Michelle