Just about the complex: how to make a mixborder yourself

We select plants, draw up diagrams, create beauty. Personal experience

Usually in winter, the users of our portal study thick books on floristry and landscape design, draw mixborder schemes, discuss them with their accomplices and redraw them. It's really hard to create a real mixborder. As noted by a forum member with a nickname Grandma Irisha“All last winter I have been reading and looking at beautiful pictures of landscape planners - so what? You go to your site with that leaflet with drawings and a shovel... nothing looms. It remains to plant where the left leg whispers to the right ear. " We propose to take advantage of the efforts of the "collective mind" to create a beautiful complex flower bed without too much trouble.

How to create a mixborder 

A mixborder is a blended border that creates the illusion of depth in borders. Usually it is created from background, intermediate plantings and foreground, and it is not necessary to plant plants rows, you can plant at random, the main thing is to pick up the plants so that they do not overlap or clog each other friend.

Any gardener would immediately like to arrange a mixborder in a permanent place, but, as a rule, everyone has a phase of plant accumulation first, and then - an eternal transplant. In order for everything to work out at once, you need to imagine the end result, work on the plan for a long time until it becomes flawless, and also not forget about the natural environment of the future composition. As the florists say, “birches do not go well with petunias”.

Imagining the end result is usually the most difficult thing.

Olga D

Participant FORUMHOUSE

 I feel that everything will end as usual: I will break the path with ropes, take everything that is, arrange, look, rearrange 8 times, and I will have a garden! I can't even figure out how everything will look like in different seasons.

Having carefully studied the mixborder question, florists come to the conclusion that it is necessary to start with the lawn, trees and shrubs. But they usually start with flowers:

At the first stage, it is good to keep a garden journal, where you can write down the flowering dates and beautiful combinations, for example: “Japanese rhododendron bloomed simultaneously with the phlox spread out by Blue perfume; beautiful contrasting combination: orange and lilac-blue. " Subsequently, these plants can be planted side by side.

How to choose plants in a mixborder

As a rule, novice florists choose plants by color. The easiest way is to make a one-color mixborder, but then it turns out that it does not please at all and even tires the eye. Several plants of a different color can remedy this situation.

Mixborder in white and silver colors can be diluted with cream plants, red with yellow ones, this will give it lightness.

The blue mixborder looks gloomy, it is diluted with white and gray.

Contrast mixborders are made on the basis of two contrasting colors, for example, purple and yellow, blue and orange, and others are added to them.

Inika

Participant FORUMHOUSE

I want to create a mixborder near the grid. As I understand it, it should have three tiers: upper, middle, lower. Length - two or three meters and wavy leading edge. And for each tier, you need to choose plants so that the flowering of some is replaced by the flowering of others. The main thing is what color scheme to choose. For some reason, I like mixborders that combine no more than three colors. I would like to make one "ceremonial" mix, take red, silver, white and some other. The other is in warm, sunny colors.

How to set the rhythm of a flower garden

At first glance, a mixborder filled with colorful flowers looks very impressive, but structure is more important than color scheme. Without it, any mixborder will look messy, especially after your flowers have faded. Plants must be matched in height, and the size and proportions of the mixborder and your garden must be taken into account. Small perennials are suitable for a small mixborder, and in a mixborder in a huge garden you can confidently plant trees and shrubs. The farther from the front edge of the mixborder, the higher the plants should be, while, for a change, you can plant several tall ones in front, only slender, and not massive.

Experienced gardeners have the concept of “upstart plant”. This technique works well when you need to set a rhythm in a flower garden.

NatalijaG

Participant FORUMHOUSE

The division in height is often violated in exemplary pictures, and in the first row, next to the ground cover, there are rather tall lilies or Veronica, or loosestrife. Of course, at the back they are lined with something even higher, but there is no clear division between high-medium-low, and this just gives the flower garden a natural look.

Each site has a "genius of the place", a tuning fork that sets the tone for everything else, and dictates what to plant and what not. Usually it is the tallest, most visible tree, often coniferous. Therefore, if you feel that you will come to conifers anyway, plant them as early as possible - they grow for a long time. And plant junipers and thuja to them - but, of course, if the area of ​​your site is not less than 10 acres.

As a rule, perennials and shrubs cannot boast of expressiveness, therefore it is recommended to include strict geometric shapes: spherical, creeping, spherical, high and narrow columnar, openwork or cubic, which is achieved haircut.

Massive plants can be balanced with cereals - the mixborder will become lighter, more airy. A large bush looks disproportionate next to a small single plant, but several small plants next to an equally large bush are already a balanced composition.

How to make a mixborder plan

All this needs to be well thought out and, for a start, "put" on the plan, on graph paper, keeping the scale. Chances are, the plants you wanted to plant just won't fit into your size. Or vice versa. Remember that one large plant can be balanced with two or three medium plants and even more small plants.

Here is the mixborder plan drawn by FORUMHOUSE member ybrjv rainbow07 - she wants to make it at the neighbor's fence to hide their greenhouse from sight.

NatalijaG trying to create a mixborder based on the following requirements:

• mostly perennials, unpretentious in care;
• the dominant colors during flowering are pink-lilac, with the addition of white, yellow and blue in small quantities;
• if possible - a decorative view in all seasons (deep winter does not count, since this is a summer residence).

The nascent mixborder lived for a season and a half, and the forum member made important conclusions for herself: what add what not to plant, what to sow next spring for seedlings, and what is better to buy ready-made seedlings.

NatalijaG

Participant FORUMHOUSE

Greens do matter. Something needs to cover the yellowing greens of spring flowering bulbous. The same decorative onion blooms beautifully, but there is no foliage, which means that it should “crawl out” from more decorative greenery.

Discussing the best photos from design magazines, the leading florists of the portal agreed that it is impossible to reproduce them on their sites, and there is no need to. But if you choose the right plants, you can end up with a beautiful composition. And for this, it is necessary to take into account not only the height, color and shape of the plants, but also the flowering period. If one plant loses its attractiveness, another should immediately replace it.

Helga

Participant FORUMHOUSE

It is interesting to create perennial flower beds with sequential, and not with simultaneous, flowering. After all, that is why many flowers for different varieties of even one species certainly give the flowering time in the description (the same peonies or daylilies). In order not to "bloom all at once", they gave at the same time an amazing picture, and that's it. This is an “instant design” technique, nothing more.

Foliage is more durable than flowers, which is why mixborders often build on contrasts in leaf shape, color and texture. Such mixes are made near the entrance to the site and along the tracks. Fern leaves contrast beautifully with the coarse, large leaves of other plants, but in order not to smear the impression, there should not be many ferns. Cirrus leaves look good next to any others. Designers recommend not to overuse plants with rounded and heart-shaped leaves - it looks boring.

If you are taking the first steps in floriculture, our article about how to create a flower bed. AND which tracks emphasize its decorative effect. You can do more with us learn about mixborders.  You can find interesting ideas in our video for any flower garden.