Choosing Flowers for Your Garden

Spring is on its way, and while we haven’t quite arrived at the April showers or the May flowers, now is a great time for garden planning, and part of that planning can include choosing flowers to grow alongside your veggies!

Flowers will boost your garden’s beauty, diversity, and medicinal uses. Consider these 10 easy and useful flowers to begin tapping into the usefulness and beauty that flowers can provide.

MOTHER EARTH NEWS blogger Mary Lou Shaw swears by the beauty and health that flowers add to her garden. Additionally, they help attract backyard pollinators — here are some of the best plants for backyard pollinators, and you better believe flowers are among them.

Flowers also work as companion crops with vegetables to help reduce pest problems by attracting beneficial insects that eat garden pets, luring them away from the vegetable crops, or by attracting birds to your garden, which will in turn eat the pests. According to the linked article, “In a recent study conducted at four organic farms in Florida, sunflowers interplanted with collard greens, kale, summer squash, tomatoes and five other vegetable crops doubled the number of insect-eating birds that visited the garden plots. The birds used the sunflowers as hunting perches, then hopped down to feed on cabbageworms, grasshoppers, and other small insects, including flea beetles.” So with flowers, you’re bringing in the good bugs and keeping out the bad — it’s a win-win situation!

Further, even more than the “Slow Flower” movement, which encourages purchasing sustainable cut flowers rather than flowers with large “footprints,” growing your own flowers will vanquish any confusion you have about how sustainable it is to decorate with flowers or to give flowers as gifts. After all, you’ll have a beautiful selection right in your backyard! These flowers can be planted this spring for summer harvest, and will ensure that you have beautiful flowers at hand without having to purchase them.

If you’re into planting flowers outside the garden, you might consider a wildflower meadow, which will add color and wildlife to your backyard, and potentially decrease the amount of mowing you have to do. You might also consider making a buck from the newfound beauty by growing flowers for cash — here’s how to get started.

Do you plant flowers? What are your favorite varieties? Share with us in the comments, and happy garden planning!

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Photo by Fotolia/jahina_photos

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Bill and Katie D.

10:29PM PDT on Apr 30, 2013

All are lovely flowers! I really like the Purple Coneflower it draws butterflys!
Bright flowers draws hummingbirds! Your yard will be beautiful!

April 30
send a green star

Lioba W.

3:21PM PDT on Apr 20, 2013

I don't have a garden, I wish to have one, when i once will move to a real house xD

April 20
send a green star

Emelie H.

6:37AM PDT on Apr 17, 2013

Thank you for the post!

I collected seeds of Chinese lanterns last fall, next to a bus stop were lots of them, almost rotting away. So I took some and now they've become small plants! I think that was quite a climate friendly way to get new plants :-D