Designing Annual Beds

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Hide CaptionShow CaptionThe key to designing a beautiful annual bed is to limit the color theme and mix an even balance of flower shapes, textures and heights.

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If you want show-stopping color in the garden, annuals are the best way to grow. Even though you must plant them every growing season, the payoff is quick and colorful. The biggest challenge is coming up with a design that works.

To help us out, we turned to Duane Otto. For the past 14 years, he's been designing award-winning annual beds for the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. He has the magic touch for mixing annuals that produce captivating combinations. Here are some of his tips:

Select a color theme--two or three colors are best. This will limit your choices and make your design much more successful. Then pick an even balance of rounded and spiked flowers. Duane says the rounded flowers give a restful feeling and the spiked flowers give an excited uplifting feeling.

Consider the texture of the flowers and the foliage. Try for a combination of fine-, medium- and coarse-textured annuals. For example, cleome is a fine-textured plant (a plant that's open and airy). Salvia, with more substance, is considered medium, and coleus, with its dense foliage, falls into the coarse category.

Place plants by height. Put tall plants in the center or back of the bed, then medium-size plants next to the tall ones, and then shorter plants in the front of the bed.

If you like to be organized, lay out your beds first on graph paper. You can even add sample pictures cut out from magazines to combine the plant materials and see if they go together. Graph paper is also an excellent tool to figure out how many plants you need for a particular space. Then transfer the plan to the soil. To make planting easier, Duane outlines the design with string and places each annual. He also pinches off each bloom at planting time; this helps produce bushier plants with more colorful blooms.