Planting wildflowers can make a wonderful, and completely natural looking garden. Wildflowers often attract birds, bees and butterflies too, plus they're excellent to use for areas of your yard which always seem to be a bit too bare and unfinished.

Creating a wildflower garden can be as simple as scattering some wildflower seeds into a specific area of your yard, or you can create an actual garden bed or plot specifically designed for growing your wild flowers, then carefully place starter plants or seeds into a pre-arranged garden layout. Since wild flowers are supposed to look like they're growing there naturally though, you'll usually get the best results by simply scattering the seeds around.

Wildflower gardens are excellent to plant into open fields and empty lots, as well as specific areas of your yard too. They work wonderfully around a mailbox post for instance, because they grow in a variety of different colors and heights. Having wildflowers grow around your mailbox post can give your home a country design type of look which is quite popular and attractive.

Planting wild flowers usually gives you a low maitenance, natural looking garden that nature takes care of on its own. Since most wildflowers are native to the area you're planting them in, you don't usually have to worry about watering them much. Wildflowers also propogate on their own - which means they'll drop seeds to the ground so new flowers will grow in the same area the following year.

Some wildflowers are annuals and some are perennials. The perennials will continue to grow and bloom for several years or more without you having to take cuttings, collect seeds, or anything else to help them. Annuals will only live for one growing season, but many wildflower annuals develop their own seeds too. You can collect these seeds and plant them in new locations next year, or you can simply let nature take its course. When nature does the job, the seeds will drop to the ground and hibernate over the winter, then many of those seeds will sprout again on their own the following year.

Most people choose to plant wildflowers in a random way. They don't plan where exactly each flowering plant will grow, and they don't select plants based on color, height or texture either. Wildflower gardens can be created in almost any way you'd like though. If you'd like to have a field full of peach or red colored wildflowers for instance, all you'd need to do is select wildflower varieties which produce the appropriate flower color for your needs.

The most difficult aspect of wildflower gardening though, is thinning out the plants once they start growing. When you scatter the seeds randomly, you can't usually tell just how crowded the flowers will be in your garden when they start to grow. It's not uncommon to end up with too many flowers in one area though, so you have to pull some of them out to give the others room to grow. The flowers are usually so pretty in bloom though, that making yourself pull some can be difficult. You will be rewarded however, by the beautiful blooms you'll start seeing on those wildflowers you left in place once they have more room to thrive.

Tags: Perennials, Annuals, Wildflower gardening

Creating a container garden is a wonderful way to make use of spare patio, deck or balcony space. It's also an excellent way to have a beautiful garden even when you live in a home which has no outdoor yard or garden space too. Many people who live in an apartment in the city for instance, create container gardens on their balcony or patio area, and some even create them using window boxes which are attached to the outside of the building just under their windows.

Container gardens are fun to create for indoor areas too, using a wide variety of plants and flowers that will spruce up your home. In fact, almost any plant or flower can be grown in a container. Plants which grow quite large will need larger containers of course though, and if you start bushes, shrubs or trees in a container you'll eventually need to transplant them outside in the ground unless they are miniature varieties.

Some of the most popular types of container gardens include: Herb gardens in the kitchen or morning room; Annual or perennial gardens on the patio or inside the home; Vegetable gardens on the patio, balcony or deck; And even specialty gardens such as container salad gardens.

Most people have their first experience with container gardens when they buy a beautiful, lush arrangement of flowers or greenery at the store. These containers are usually filled to the brim with new flower blooms, or trailing vines that cascade over the side of the container.

Unfortunately a lot of people find themselves with dead plants just a few weeks after having bought the beautiful arrangement, and they're at a loss as to why the plants didn't live. The answer is simple though. When you buy a ready made container garden at the store which is packed full of blooms and greenery, the container is usually too full for the plants to have the room they need to grow, live, and thrive.

To keep container garden plants alive for long periods of time, you must make sure they have enough room for their roots. Some plants have much larger or longer root balls than others too, so those plants will require larger containers in order to continue growing successfully.

If you really like the way a ready made container garden looks, you can take steps to keep it alive and beautiful in your home. When you buy the garden, simply buy a new, larger container to transfer the garden to. When you get home, just remove the plants from their original container and place them into the new one with additional soil. You may have to separate the plants a bit if they're all tangled together, but generally you can keep the arrangement looking very similar to the way it was when you bought it.

The larger container will give the plants more room for their roots to spread and grow, so your new garden will continue looking lovely for a very long time. As the plants continue growing though of course, you may need to ocassionally transfer them to another, even larger pot. Alternatively you can separate out some of the plants into smaller containers, and you'll have multiple container gardens instead of just one.

Tags: Container Gardening

Tropical gardens have become quite popular in more recent years, because the plants that you can grow in this type of garden are full of gorgeous color. Tropical plants often have a more unique look about them too, which makes them all the more appealing for areas of the country where everyone seems to plant the same things in their gardens.

Tropical gardens often attract butterflies, bees and hummingbirds too, and this makes the garden all the more enjoyable throughout the year. Tropical gardens can contain a wide variety of plants, but some require lots of heat while others require lots of water. Tropical gardens also don't often survive freezing temperatures either, so many people in cooler climates choose to create tropical container gardens which can be taken inside when bitter cold winter temperatures come around.

Most tropical plants require a lot of sunlight though, so if you're planting them into a ground based garden or raised garden bed, be sure to choose the sunniest spot you can find in your yard. You'll want to plant tropical plants and flowers in areas which get a minimum of six hours direct sunlight each day.

Some tropical garden plants such as bougainvillea, thrive on irregular watering patterns. The bougainvillea plant for example, is natural in areas of the world where there could be pouring rain for weeks, then months of dry spells. You can mimic these conditions when growing bougainvillea plants in your tropical garden by watering them really well for a week or two, then not watering them for at least a month. You'll find that these tropical plants seem to bloom best when they've been stressed, or kept dry for extended periods of time.

Bougainvillea plants can be grown in a variety of ways too. Most varieties will climb as a vine in the right conditions and with the right care, but these plants can also be shaped and pruned into small shrubs and bushes too. Bougainvillea plants have hook like thorns on them which can hurt if you're stabbed by them, but these thorns is what allow the plant to climb fences and trellises, and create a gorgeous display of color.

Bougainvillea tend to create tiny flowers which most people miss. The flowers are surrounded by paper thin bracts which bloom in a variety of bold, beautiful colors, and most people think these bracts are the actual flowers of the plant. The flowers themselves though, are tiny and located inside the bracts.

Esperanza and Spanish Broom are two more excellent plants to put into a tropical garden. These plants do quite well in really dry gardens too, because they're both heat and drought tolerant, which makes these beautiful plants quite hardy and tough. Despite their toughness though, both of these plants produce gorgeous, bright showy yellow flowers that bloom continuously from spring through fall.

Tags: Bougainvillea, Tropical Gardening