Before you put in your beds and borders, reflect on how the location of your garden can give you viewing pleasure throughout the season. Plant annuals where you can most enjoy their color and fragrance during their relatively brief life. Almost everyone’s yard has some features that are ready-made for planting beds and borders. Find the situation that most closely matches your yard and discover how to re-create a design or adapt it for your own garden:

• Sunny patio bed: Many homeowners have a backyard patio that they use for various summer activities. Creating a flower bed between the patio and the lawn is easy — and a perfect way to show off annuals during the warm months. Plant the tallest flowers in the interior of the bed so that your bed looks nice from both the patio and the lawn. If the bed is so large that you can’t reach the middle to weed or water, create a meandering path of a few stepping stones through the bed. When choosing your own annuals for a border around your sunny backyard patio, you can use the following criteria to limit your search. (Because nurseries and garden centers can offer such an overwhelming number of plants to select from, you may want to narrow down the possibilities even more by picking a color scheme.)
  • Choose annuals that flourish in the sun and have a long bloom season. Start with healthy transplants in nursery six-packs or 4-inch pots, both of which bloom more quickly than annuals started from seeds.
  • Look for sturdy, stocky plants — anything too tall or leggy will probably block the patio from the lawn or be damaged. Plant low, carpeting-type annuals for areas of the bed that get the most traffic.
• Shady bed around a large tree: Trees are usually the largest and often the most distinctive element in a garden. One way to show them off is to plant a circular flower bed around their trunks. A mix of pastel colors looks great in the shade, particularly with the addition of plenty of white and an accent of green lawn. A nicely pruned specimen tree, encircled by a flower bed, can serve as the main element in creating a stunning front garden. Make the bed large enough to really accent the tree and to allow for a pleasing complexity of plants. A circular bed 10 feet in diameter serves nicely in this situation.
  Remember that flowers may have difficulty thriving in a tree’s shade because they’re competing with the tree roots for water. As you plan such a bed, select less-thirsty annuals that flower well in dappled shade. One simple planting scheme includes annuals that perform under those conditions and, at the same time, add a cool splash of color and a large dose of drama to any garden.
• Border for a formal walkway: Annuals can brighten up the skinniest of spaces providing bright color and a sweet scent you can appreciate as you pass by. A 20-foot-long brick walkway between your entry gate and your front door may have only a 2-foot-wide border along each side. In such restricted spaces, consider a simple color scheme with a minimum of different kinds of plants. Typically, formal walkways are in full sun.
• Border for an informal walkway: When you’re edging a curved walkway made of irregularly shaped paving or stepping stones, you’re likely to want different styles and colors of plants than you’d choose to line a straight brick pathway. The most appropriate planting choices for curving walkways are a loose variety of annuals that duplicate the appearance of a cottage garden border — even within such a confined space as a 3-foot-wide walkway border.
• Border for a modern-style walkway: Front pathways leading to ranch-style houses, or more modern-style houses, often stretch from the driveway along the front of the house to the porch and doorway. Such pathways are usually made of poured aggregate or smoothly laid stone.  ....read more