Add Drama to Your Landscape With Flowers

Would you like a sea of color floating on your landscape greenery? The trick is to plant a palette of gorgeous flowers that acts as a relief to the leaves and shrubs around them. Color coordinated blossoms can open up your landscape. Try a Carolina Allspice. The Michael Lindsey variety offers glossy red leaves and sweet scents. 

In the fall, you’ll spot bright yellow flowers poking their little heads out alongside the brick red ones! Along the sides of your home, you might plant a lighter-colored flowerbed—big, snowy blooms of the Hydrangea Annabelle variety, for instance. These “Annabelle’s” are perhaps America’s favorite old-fashioned shrub! 

Growing up to four feet tall, they complement the vivid reds of the Allspice beautifully. An additional benefit is that these blooms, when dried, are also a lovely source of arrangement for your dinner table, or as a coffee table centerpiece. If you have a wooden fence that’s painted a whimsical color, like blue, these snowy blooms make an especially attractive addition, planted lengthwise right in front of the fence. 

For indoors and outdoors, a very popular new succulent variety is the Calandiva, a member of the Kalanchoe family.  Its miniature rose-shaped flowers bloom quite a long time when kept outside until first frost.  Then, about a month later, new buds appear. As with all succulents, do not over-water Calandivas. Once a fortnight is fine.  They bloom in hot pinks, whites, lemon yellows and reds.

Are you a purist about one particular type of flower? Place it in a series of clay pots, and go monotone! “Playing with one color along a row of flowering shrubs or bushes is breathtaking,” says Maria R., a landscape designer in the Northern Florida region. "Take a tip from the famed Filoli estate, in California - tht mansion of unparalleled beauty - and have lots of potted daffodils and, if you can afford it, a walled garden gate."  

Here are some other touches that’ll liven up your greenery: