How wonderful would it feel to enter your garden any time of the year and witness mesmerizing scents, colors, and textures of blooming flowers and lush greenery?

While the idea may seem like one for your dreams, it’s possible to create a garden that defies seasonal boundaries, leaving you a lively, natural escape conveniently in your yard.  Let's explore how to design a four-season landscape that thrives with various shades no matter the season.  It’s time to make it spring all year round!

Designing A Seasonal Landscape The Blooms Year-Round

The entire process starts with effective planning so you can invest your energy and time into a meaningful garden that seamlessly transitions as the seasons change. 

Consider Your Region

When creating a garden that blooms year-round, knowing your growing zone is crucial. This helps you choose plants that will thrive in your specific climate. Local garden centers help find plants suited to your zone and native to your area, requiring less maintenance. Understanding your growing zone is key to selecting the right plants for your garden, ensuring a colorful and thriving outdoor space throughout the year.

The Structural Bones Of Your Landscape

When you design the landscape of your all-year garden, there are two primary elements in creating structure and bones in your landscape: Laying out your hardscaping and strategically selecting the plants.

As far as the hardscaping is concerned, it’s important because it’ll bring the entire landscape together, even with the plants, making it an essential part of keeping a four-season garden. To dive deeper, hardscaping includes all the permanent, intentional structures or pieces of your landscape. 

Some examples include decks, patios, pathways, arbors, gazebos, and pergolas. Structures also like water walls, firepits or fireplaces, and outdoor kitchens add a unique focal point, as well. Even strategically placed boulders and rocks can add structure and winter interest to your landscape.

Hardscaping also entails the materials you’ll use in your landscape; this means choosing between wood, stone, iron, brick, concrete, etc. Choosing your materials makes the entire process even more fun because it’s the first step to making your landscape uniquely you.

Once you finish the structural and hardscaping elements, your yard has the “base” foundation to start working on your year-round blooming garden.

Don’t Skimp On Maintenance

Regular garden maintenance is essential for a healthy and vibrant garden year-round. Deadheading spent blooms encourages continuous blooming and prevents energy wastage on seed production. Applying compost helps retain moisture, replenish nutrients, and maintain a healthy soil environment. 

Good gardening practices such as mulching, weeding, watering, and fertilizing are crucial. Mulch is especially important as it feeds plants, retains moisture, suppresses weeds, and regulates temperature. 

Leaving some spent flowers can add color and interest to the winter garden while providing food and cover for birds and overwintering pollinators. Additionally, if the temperatures are freezing, consider installing spunbound frost protection blanket to insulate your plants and lengthen flowering or harvesting time.

Use A Mix Of Plants

Many often dive straight into planting once the hardscaping is ready. While that’s alright, it’s important to start by choosing strong, structural plants to support and form the bones of your seasonal landscaping. 

So, build those bones by starting with hardy plants. Evergreens or conifers like boxwood, pines, holly, blue star junipers, gold mop cypress, and yew maintain their foliage throughout the year. Similarly, winter interest plants such as river birch, paperbark maple, red twig dogwood, coral maple bark, etc., are also great options for durability and adding color.

Now, you can select a mix of plants that bring colors for every season. Consider incorporating different types of planting like perennials, annuals, ornamental grasses, bulbs, etc. However, perennials are a top priority for a garden with all-year color.

Choose fall, spring, and summer bloomers to extend your seasonal color. You can also visit a local garden center every month to see what’s in bloom to incorporate it into your garden. While perennials form the backbone color, annuals add the extra oomph to the color palette; you can include annuals that bloom for a single season to strategically fill in empty spots and add pops of color.

Don’t forget about shrubs, vines, and groundcovers that offer lush foliage, extravagant blooms, captivating warm colors, and ethereal texture during winter. You can also consider long-blooming flowers like annual salvias or coreopsis that ensure a year-round display of color. Plus, long-blooming flowers also offer consistent food for pollinators and turn your garden into a wildlife haven. 

Get Creative To Add A Touch Of Color

Now that you know what plants to use in your all-season landscape, it’s time to strategically layer them in a way that all of them have a role to play in adding a boost of color and interest to your garden.

Here’s a basic guide you can use to create the layers:

• 1st Layer

Ornamental Trees: Whether it’s a small yard or a big one, one to five (or more, depending on the size of your garden) ornamental trees are a must to add structure to the landscape.

• 2nd Layer 

Evergreen Shrubs: Evergreen shrubs create a cohesive look by blending with the taller trees, which adds a harmonious touch to the landscape in your yard.

• 3rd Layer

Perennial Deciduous Shrubs: These are meant to add balance to your landscape, considering they are long bloomers and have multi-season interest.

• 4th Layer

Perennial Plants and Flowers: These are the spotlight of your garden from late spring to early fall, ensuring the liveliness of your landscape never fades off.

• 5th Layer

Ground covers, Grasses, and Vines: While many overlook ground covers and vines, they’re the final touch that links all the layers of plants in your yard into a beautiful garden.

Apart from layering your garden well, you can also strategically use natural elements to spruce up the colors and textures in the yard. Here are some options to consider: Some elements to consider are:

• Trees with peeling or unusual barks like Silver birch, Paperback maple, Acer Driseum, Crape myrtle, etc.
• Unique branching or foliage structure trees like the Blue Atlas cedar, live oak, giant arborvitae, Colorado Blue Spruce, White fir, etc.
• Plants with winter berries like Yaupon or Winterberry holly, Beautyberry, Coralberry, Pagoda dogwood, Nannyberry, etc.
• Unique seed pod-producing plants like Garden Angelica, Starflower, Milkweed, Wisteria, Columbine, etc.
• Ornamental grasses or sedges like Blue Fescue, Switchgrass, Little bluestem, Fountaingrass, Maiden grass, Pampas grass, etc.

Why Should You Consider Seasonal Landscaping?

Besides adding beauty to your home’s appearance, seasonal landscaping for all-year colors creates a more enjoyable and inviting outdoor space. You can spend more time relaxing in nature while the changing focal points of colors refresh the overall landscape for each season. Plus, it’s wildlife-friendly and welcomes biodiversity, creating a sustainable ecosystem. 

Design Builders is a design and build firm specializing in screened porches, decks, and outdoor kitchens.  We also work with other products such as motorized screening systems and awnings.  If you live in the DMV, contact u today and see what we can do together !