Get That Showcase Garden
Look With Companion Gardening

If you have always desired that "showcase quality garden", then you will want to consider the possibilities of companion plants. Companion plants balance out each other with contrasts and complements that work on all levels of your gardening experience.

There are several categories of companion gardening.

The categories are: Flower Color, Flower Shape, Fower Texture, Environmental Concerns, and Garden Themes.

To provide continuity in your garden landscape you need to consider both contrasting flowers as well as complements for the shape of the flowers.

 You can plan your garden by using both strong vertical plant arangements, and also contrasting horizontal plants as well.

A flower with a vertical shape like the arborvitae is well contrasted by the flower with a horizontal or rounded shape like the Mariesii viburnum. Complements help ease the eye and can lead your garden visitors to follow the path laid out by you. 

A well-balanced garden landscape needs to have both contrasting and complementary flowers for the best visual effect.

Color is another feature used in most gardens, and can used to help bring out the focal points in your garden. Gardeners will often use pastel colors because they feel they are easy on the eyes.

The bolder colors of yellow, reds and oranges are used more sparingly and for strong visual impact when you need to direct the eye of your visitor to a particular feature of your garden. You can balance out these bolder colors with blues and purples. Use shades of red to transition between your bold colors and your pastel colors.

Remember that color can be more than flowers; you can paint a picture in your garden with foliage, berries and stems too.

Different contrasts and complements can also be found in the texture of foliage. There are finely textured plants like arborvitae, and coarser looking plants like viburnum. When you put these two together they present a combined texture form that is pleasing to the eye.

The use of plants which have a difference in their leaf sizes are also good together like the viburnum and the boxwood, both with rounded shapes but very different sizes.

Leaf size is probably the best way to plan for textural variation in your garden. Good texture contrast can be found in Junipers and Grasses, Ferns and Hosta. Some excellant examples of complementing plants would be plants like, Hollies and Rhodies, Iris and Daylilies.

The installation of a drip irrigation system was another move on my part that reduced the amount of water I needed to fully water my garden. The great thing about these systems is that they constantly drip into your plants, so that every single drop is absorbed. With traditional watering systems, usually the roots get too overwhelmed with the sheer amount of water in the soil.

Although the items we have listed so far are very important, designing your garden involves a lot more4 than color, texture and shape; the environment is another aspect that must also be considered.

When we use the term "the environment" it includes other factors such as, sun or shade, soil composition, pests, wind factor, and wildlife.

While having a full fledged garden is rewarding and enjoyable, lots of people simply don’t have the time that is required to maintain it. Whether you have too much going on at work or too many kids to take care of, you should never try to operate a garden if you don’t think you can handle it.

You can plan a garden around shape, color, texture, and environment and have a beautiful showcase garden with contrasts and complements that will be the envy of all your neighbors or you can have a themed garden that will impress visitors with a purposeful layout such as a butterfly garden, rock garden, or a native plant garden.