How to Make a Flowerbed to Suit the Space You Have

A flowerbed gives you a place to plant colorful annuals, perennials, and shrubs that can fill your yard with beauty. Flowers are essential for butterflies and other pollinators, so if you learn how to make a flowerbed for blooming plants, it will roll out the welcome mat for these beneficial creatures.

Like a blank canvas, a new flowerbed offers you the chance to be creative and fill it with whatever you love. The options are nearly endless, but the actual building part comes first. It might seem daunting, but with some planning, preparation, and sweat equity, you’ll soon enjoy a more beautiful, flower-filled garden.

How to Make a Flowerbed

When figuring out how to make a flowerbed from scratch, there are a few things to consider before you start. Here are the questions you need to answer:

Where will it go?

Anywhere from a corner of the backyard to your front entryway can make a great spot for a flowerbed. You can place one along a deck or porch, underneath a tree, or around a garden feature like a pond. If you plant near a driveway or along a curb, consider traffic safety when it comes to plant height, and if you live where it is icy in the winter, keep in mind salt spray, which can kill plants.

How much sunlight will the space get?

Many popular bedding plants, like annual flowers, require full sun, meaning a minimum of six hours of direct sunlight daily. You can choose a spot in part-sun or even a mostly shady area, but you’ll be somewhat limited in the flowers that will grow there.

What’s the soil like?

Most flowering annuals and perennials appreciate loamy soil with plenty of compost added to it. Rake away rocks or other debris from the site, break up large dirt clods, and add compost to enrich the bed and encourage healthy plant growth. It’s also a good idea to do a soil test to determine if you should add any nutrients your plants need to look their best.

Flowerbed Ideas and Designs

Once you choose a site, it’s time for the fun part—flowerbed design. Here are some ideas to spark your imagination for making a flowerbed as pretty and useful as possible.

• Looking to make a statement in front of the house? Wrap a small flowerbed around your mailbox, line your front walkway, add color underneath a tree, or surround the bases of the front porch risers.
• Go geometric with a perfectly square, rectangular, circular, or triangular bed, or go curvy.
• Focus on tall or dense plants to help block unattractive backyard features such as air conditioners, trash cans, swimming pool heaters, or storage sheds.

Removing Grass and Building the Flowerbed

Unless you have a bare patch of earth, you must remove the turf before planting your flowers. After marking the outline of the new flowerbed with spray paint or white flour, remove the grass inside the lines using one of these two basic ways:

1. Dig up existing grass.

Digging out the grass can be hard work. First, use a shovel to remove a section of grass from the center of the planned bed. Continue to remove turf by wedging the shovel or a hoe under the edges of the grass and lifting and peeling the sod away. After you remove the grass, prepare the soil for planting.

2. Make a flowerbed without digging.

Removing grass without digging is the lengthy-but-easy method. Cover the entire area of your future flowerbed with several overlapping sheets of newspaper. Layer the paper at least six pages deep and cover it with several inches of rich soil or compost. Water well. Over the next few months, the buried grass will die, and the newspaper will decompose, adding nutrients to the soil. Keep the area covered for up to a year before planting for best results.

Once the turf is gone, outline the area with landscape edging made of plastic, stone, brick, or wood. Some quirky materials you can use for edging include glass bottles, large seashells, or decorative metal fencing.

Build a Raised Flowerbed

Building a raised flowerbed is another option. You can use wood boards cut to the desired length and build whatever shape or size you want. If you prefer the simplest solution, buy a raised flowerbed kit that supplies everything you need and easily snaps together without sawing or hammering. Most kits create fairly small squares or rectangles.

If you build a raised flowerbed on top of existing grass, cover the turf with a few sheets of newspaper and fill the bed with garden soil or a soil mix designed for raised beds; finish off with a layer of compost. If you want to build on top of concrete or another hard surface, you’ll need a protective bottom layer of permeable landscape fabric to keep soil from leaking out the bottom of the raised bed while allowing water to drain.

Flowerbed Plants

You designed your flowerbed, removed the grass, prepared the soil, and edged your soon-to-be-planted site. Now it’s time to plant! Choose varieties that do well in your climate and are suited to your site’s exposure to sunlight. Beyond that, the best flowers are the ones you love the most.

• Low-growing annuals such as sweet alyssum, lobelia, and impatiens work well as front-of-the-border plants.
• Add zing to the front of the house with a colorful mixture of varied-height beauties like zinnias, snapdragons, or marigolds.
• Tall flowers, including sunflowers, hollyhocks, and cosmos, can be especially inviting when flanking the steps to your front porch or along a property fence.
• Raised flowerbed planting ideas include a center row of tall and medium-height blooms with a border of cascading flowers like bacopa, ivy geranium, moss rose, or calibrachoa.
• Other ideas include a garden of single-color flowers, a patriotic mix of red-white-and-blue blooms, a pastel flowerbed, or a “moon garden” planted entirely in white flowers.

Building a flowerbed from scratch might seem intimidating, but it’s a fairly straightforward project that just about any enthusiastic DIYer or gardener can accomplish. The time spent planning, designing, and preparing will be repaid when you admire the beautiful blooms.