Everyone loves flowers, from the bees and butterflies to children and the elderly. They relax, impress, and inspire us with their beauty and the many shapes they take.Independence is climate zone 6b, so you’ll want to make your flower choices based on the hardiness of the plant. When you are shopping for just the right flowers and foliage plants, be sure to stop in to TLC Nursery & Outdoor Living garden center. We can meet all your landscaping needs, from lawn care to flower beds and beyond. Stop by and browse our wide selection today.
From Spring to Fall
It’s a great thing to have flowers blooming in your garden all spring and summer all the way into fall, from the first daffodils to frosty ornamental cabbage in the fall. Not only will you always have flowers to bring into your home to decorate your table and make your home smell great, but you’ll be providing food for pollinators from the first meal in the spring until the first hard frost.
Flowers from bulbs, including daffodils and tulips, come up early here in Kansas and need a bit of care, but are worth it. Asters bloom late and can be chosen for their colors that can be part of your Halloween display.
Annual Decorative Containers
Impatiens, pansies, and petunias are just a few of the annuals that you’ll regularly see in a container. An annual lives just one year, so they are a good choice for a temporary display, be it on your front porch or in front of your store. You can make patriotic displays for summer holidays with a red, white, and blue display for Memorial Day, Flag Day, and the Fourth of July.
Flowers for Xeriscaping
Xeriscaping is making gardening choices based on low water use. Top picks for a xeriscape flower garden include the ever-hardy yarrow, which comes in a variety of colors, cone flowers, or echinacea that attract butterflies and need very little water. Blanket flowers are a colorful addition to any xeriscape flower bed. Pine-leaf Penstemon with their tiny scarlet flowers are great flowers for the edges of your flowerbed. Sedum is also commonly found in flower beds that need to endure droughts. The waxy leaves and large flower heads make a lovely addition to any garden.
Flowerbeds to Impress!
Lilies are great flowers to include in your garden plan. They prefer cool soil so put them where their bases get steady shade. From low growing plants like hostas. THey need about 6 – 8 hours of sun a day so finding the right balance between enough sun and cool soil may take some planning. Peonies are a delight to have in the garden. They look like roses, but with many more layers of petals and some varieties are truly stunning with delicate inner petals. They need to be staked for the heavy flowers to stay upright. The blooms occur in early summer, but their dark green foliage adds depth of color to the flowerbed until fall. These long-lived plants can last up to 50 years and provide flowers for your bouquets every year.
Aromatic Flowers
An aromatic-themed flower garden can be part of any landscaping plan. Is there anything more pleasant than sitting in the evening as amazing flower scents waft by?
Lavender loves hot Kansas summers, and the aroma is relaxing. You can harvest some of the flowers for use in homemade icecream, massage oils, or sachets. Rosemary and other herbs make for an olfactory treat that will make you hungry, while honeysuckle and roses will encourage you to stop and take a deep breath and enjoy the moment.
Foliage Tricks
Hostas are a solid choice for adding variegated foliage to your flower bed. This means that the leaves have a variety of shades of green in them, and often have stripes. This quality makes them a top choice for adding interesting visuals in your bed. They also stay relatively low and create shade that keeps the soil cool, inhibits weed growth and evaporation.
Keeping Weeds Out of Flowerbeds
When grassy weeds sprout up in your flower bed, the best thing to do is to pull them. There are chemicals that can kill just grass, and you can ask at our garden store in Independence, so you don’t accidentally kill your flowers. You can pull the grass and put down pre-emergent to make sure seed can’t germinate.
Stop by our garden center this week and indulge your landscaping desires!