Sprucing Up the Flower Garden

Have you neglected your flower garden to the point that you cannot distinguish between the dead leaves and decaying flower fronds from last fall and summer, and the new growth from this spring? If so, it's time to think about sprucing up your flower garden. Just like children can outgrow their clothes, flowers can outgrow their garden and beds, losing the structure and shape of a once-beautiful garden. Flower gardens can overgrow quickly in the spring and summer, and are more prone to death by weeds if not cared for often. Follow these guidelines to spruce up your flower garden, and restore it to your original landscaping plan:

• Begin at one end of your flower garden and dig up your perennials, setting them to the side.
• Aerate the dirt where the plants were, digging and churning the flower bed until the soil is fine and free of clumps.
• Pull all weeds and add mulch to the bed, mixing it into the soil thoroughly.
• Before placing the perennials back into the flower bed, separate them, removing any grass that has grown between them.
• Rearrange the clean perennials back into the flower bed, perhaps creating a new design.

As you work through your entire garden, work with one type of plant at a time, removing them, mulching the new flower bed space, and then replacing them in a new spot. Pull all of the weeds you see, and make sure that you dig down to remove their roots. When you remove annuals, take care when you dig up the tubers and bulbs that you don't slice or cut them. When replacing and rearranging your bulbs, separate them to promote new growth. When placing plants back into the flower garden, arrange taller flowers like lilies to the back, keeping shorter varieties, such as creeping phlox, in front as an edge runner.

Another way to spruce up your flower garden is to add accents. Some wonderful additions to your flower garden could be birdfeeders, birdhouses, chrome globes, glass balls, a fountain, garden lighting, wind chimes, a trellis, or ceramic figurines. Decorative mulch can reinvigorate a flower garden by adding splashes of color to coordinate or enhance the color of your flowers.

Be creative and allow your flower garden to be another expression of who you are. Add walking paths to your garden, or install a bench so that visitors and family can sit and enjoy the beauty you've created.