The cone flowers in the picture above are from a small perennial flower garden I keep outside my kitchen door. For those of us that live in the Midwest, gardening begins over Memorial Day weekend. Its possible to plant before then, but the soil is not warm enough for plants to make any progress. This weekend I put in both my vegetable garden and flower garden and I'd like to introduce you to a little technique I like to call "clump gardening". I don't recommend this for vegetables, but it is wonderful for flowers, especially annuals. The idea is to group clusters of plants together to create high impact accents of color in selected areas of the garden. You can get a feel for this in the photo of my garden from last year. I "clumped" the geraniums so there would be splashes of red through out the green foundation plantings. The cone flowers shown above were also arranged for pops of color along my fence. I far prefer the bright showy shocks of color that you can achieve with "clump planting" to lonely flowers scattered sparsely throughout a bed.
Until next time,
Genevieve
Genevieve
