Starting a garden: 10 flower-bed basics

When designing your home's garden, you don't need a green thumb to make it beautiful. Keeping these ten basic considerations in mind when making a flower bed will help create a garden that looks pretty and serves several functions, too.

Take the architecture of your house into account when designing a new bed so that both work in harmony.

• A Georgian-style or ultramodern house, for example, might look best with straight-edged, formal beds.
• A saltbox or ranch-style house would be enhanced by naturalistic beds in the cottage-garden tradition.

"Praise large gardens, plant small ones," says a wise Chinese proverb.

• A small, well-designed bed with beautiful colour combinations and interesting specimens can be just as attractive and satisfying as a large one — and easier to manage, too.
• Plan the size of your flowerbed according to what suits your property and to the time you can devote to maintaining it.

• For uniform straight edges, mark the boundaries of a new bed with stakes and string before digging in with a spade or edger.
• For a curved bed, mark the contours with a piece of garden hose — it's flexible enough to assume any shape, yet stable enough to stay put.

• In an island bed surrounded by lawn or paths on all sides, place the tallest plants in the centre, then use increasingly shorter plants as you move towards the edges.
• For a naturalistic effect, offset the centre of the island slightly and accent it with a blooming shrub or small, flowering tree.

Formal beds in front yards often look best when colour combos sing with clarity, such as yellow and blue, red and white, or orange and purple.

In addition to colour and bloom time, pick plants by the forms of their flowers. A mix of contrasting and complementary shapes will add interest to the bed.

• Many flowers have flat, daisy-shaped blossoms, which look livelier in the company of others with varying shapes and forms, from spikes and saucers to trumpets and bells.

Working with a single colour, such as white or yellow, can be fun.

• Include a collection of annuals and perennials that bloom in slightly different hues and feature different forms and sizes. The effect can be amazing.

Because there will be times when blooms are sparse, take into account the form, size and colour of the plant's foliage.

• Annuals with showy foliage, such as dusty miller, coleus, Persian shield and ornamental sweet potato vine, do a good job of unifying the diversified plantings of bright bloomers.

Choose a variety of flowering ornamentals.

• Many bulbs provide early spring colour, while perennials change the garden's look from week to week.
• Annuals are steady performers, adding enduring colour and filling in while hardy plants mature; because they last only one season, annuals also let you experiment with different schemes.

Plants such as St. John's wort, periwinkle, potentilla or pachysandra need to be stopped from spreading beyond their beds.

• Dig a narrow trench and drive flat tiles, slates or roofing shingles — lined up side by side — vertically into the ground to from a barrier.

With these ten tips you're on your way to creating a beautiful and varied garden oasis.