Beautiful gardens are not accidental

While spring seems far in the future, spring flowers are on their way.

Experienced gardeners know these beautiful gardens are not accidents. Planning for beauty is essential. Plan and plant those flowers this fall for a show-stopping, talk-of-the-neighborhood garden next spring.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty when designing spring gardens is that you are designing blind. What that means is, you have to design and envision the garden in your mind. This is particularly true of bulbs. Taking these dried, onion looking balls and dropping them in the soil and expecting them to bloom seems somewhat incomprehensible.

The best advice I can give to any garden designer is to make a shopping list. You would never try to build a building just by going to the store and buying the materials you like. You need the kind and amounts of lumber to build walls and roofs, and you need shingles, siding and other materials to complete an attractive, structurally sound building.

Unfortunately, many gardeners just buy what looks good to them the day they are in the nursery. While they might look good when you buy them, you need a variety of sizes, colors and textures and different bloom times to keep a flower bed interesting.

The book "Temple Square Gardening" describes four basic elements of blind designing of flower beds by relating them to parts of your body. The four elements are as follows:

1. Start with your skeletal flowers. Like the skeleton of your body, the skeletal flowers provide the framework or support for the design of the bed. Skeletal flowers are dominant and four characteristics make a specific flower stand out in the bed.

Flowers take on dominance from their height or spread, their bright colors or their prominent position in the bed. Plant these flowers along a curved line you lay out in the center of the bed or in an informal radiating pattern from the center of a bed. Skeletal flowers comprise 10-20 percent of the total number of flowers in the beds.

Skeletal spring flowers can include delphiniums, for their dominant height, bleeding hearts for their dominant spread, and bright red tulips for their dominant color or any of many other flowers in the center of the beds to give them a dominant position.