One of the most beautiful gardens is one that incorporates all the colors of seasons.  While creating gardens with spring or summertime flowers is beautiful, adding in the rich, warm colors of fall and winter complete the look.  In addition to a magnificent looking garden, you will also enjoy blooms starting early in the year and not ending until fall.

Keep in mind that planting perennials is a great choice in that they will bloom year after year.  The one downside is that perennials also bloom for a short time.  On the other hand, you can enjoy beautiful blooms from annuals all summer long but they will die at the end of the season, meaning you need to replant new annuals each year.  Therefore, your best bet for an all-season garden is to use a combination of perennials and annuals to achieve the look.

Adding a raised planter bed can help achieve an interesting staggered height look to achieve different elevations and raise smaller plants to give them a better focal advantage. Another way to create focal points with your flowering plants, which like to climb, is to add an arbor, pergola or trellis or a combination of all of these. Arbors, trellises and pergolas can be used to make spectacular displays that get the flower blooms up at eye level where they can be showcased and enjoyed.  Making use of planters and planter boxes can also give you the eye appeal of bringing in some outside colors to complement or showcase your plants. Planters also make it easier to bring favorite plants into your home to add color to your inside space.

One of the main reasons many gardeners fail when trying to plant this type of garden is that they buy all of their plants and flowers in the springtime, meaning most already have blooms or will soon bloom.  Even though flowers with blooms generally sell much quicker than just a green plant without blooms, the problem is that by the middle of the summer, all of the blooms are gone and you now have a boring garden with no color. If this happens you can always add a decorative statue or fountain to add color during the drab times between blooms.

What you want to do instead is start by thinking of the seasons as having three phases of color, one for the early portion of the year, one for the mid portion, and one for later in the year.  With this guide, you would then choose plants and flowers that will bloom within these times so that your garden has color all year long.

To create your plant list, you will first start by writing down all of your existing plants along with the plants you are interested in buying.  The plants will be broken down by one-third for each season.  In other words, if you have decided to plant 12 plants, you would put four in the ground early, four in the mid season, and the final four in the late season.

Make sure to include a chair, bench or furniture to sit back and enjoy your garden as it changes colors through the seasons. You might want to add a decorative gazing ball to reflect you tapestry of flowers. What better way to reflect the beauty of the garden you’ve made.  You may also want to add a garden waterfall or fountain to create a great focal point in your own garden oasis. Or perhaps this might also be the perfect place for a bronze statue or fountain. 

Next, you want to combine your perennials that will all bloom at the same time into groups.  In this case, you might have peonies and irises that bloom early in one group, going with two peonies with three irises.  Then for the mid season, you would choose something such as phlox and purple coneflowers, and so on.

An excellent idea is that once you have your clumps of perennials, go ahead and put some bulbs in between.  You could plant things such as daffodils, tulips, or ornamental onions that would provide beautiful springtime color, and then to fill in other areas, with your choice of coordinating annuals.

Once your garden has begun to finish the flowering process, to keep the garden looking beautiful you can use plants and flowers with gorgeous leaves.  For example, many vines and types of ivy, along with a huge selection of plants have leaves with various shades of green as well as rich hues of burgundy, yellow, and other wonderful colors.