I’ve been working on this whenever I get a chance, which hasn’t been often enough, since I’m also finishing our basement this spring; today I finally finished planting all the new flowers in our long backyard flowerbed, after a lot of weeding, giving away plants I don’t want anymore (or tossing some that became like weeds), and moving the desirable perennials toward the back of the border (since most are moderately tall) and into groups that mass the same colors together.

This is the flowerbed I wrote about last year, when I gathered advice from the GardenWeb landscaping and annuals forums. I’ll post some photos later, but
for now, here’s the list of annuals I bought last week at Cook’s Farm and Greenhouse, a local nursery, and at Wal-Mart (about $120 spent on around 240 plants):

• Salvia coccinea ‘Lady in Red’
• Salvia farinacea ‘Victoria Blue’
• Salvia splendens ‘Vista Purple’
• Trailing vinca ‘Mediterranean Punch’ (I didn’t even know there was a trailing variety of the annual vincas! Very cool.)
• Gazania ‘Kiss Rose’
• Sweet potato vine ‘Blackie’
• Sweet potato vine ‘Margerita’
• Verbena ‘Obsession Lilac’
• Verbena ‘Obsession Red”
• Verbena ‘Romance Scarlet/Eye’
• Verbena ‘Heirloom Light Blue’
• Zinnia ‘Profusion White’ (just a few for accents)

I also had these plants growing from seed or cuttings that I mixed into the bed:

• Wave petunias in shades of pink/lavender (These are the product of my obsessive garden nuttiness — I took cuttings off of petunias in downtown SLC last fall, just before they all froze to death in the city planters. If you bring them indoors, they live like a perennial. I’m not sure it was worth the time to keep them alive all winter, though!)
• Alyssum ‘Oriental Nights’
• Lychnis (gives some gray foliage as well as small rose-red flowers)

In addition, I used these perennials that were already in the bed, but I moved them around to form groups of the same plants:

• Campanula glomerata
• Lavatera tauricensis
• Purple and white coneflowers (I can’t remember which ones are white! We’ll see if I need to move them again after they bloom.)
• Dianthus deltoides ‘Brilliancy’
• Shasta daisies
• Lavenders (these didn’t get moved – they’re too big)
• One lonely chrysanthemum
• Salvia nemorosa ‘East Friesland’
• Rocky Mountain Penstemon

So far, I think it’s really going to look good! The bed is chock full of interesting plants, with lots of variety. I did get a lot of salvias, but they’re all different colors, shapes and heights. I also got a lot of verbenas, but I varied the colors a bit, and I think it’s going to work well.