Designing and Caring for a White Garden

Designing and caring for a white garden is a lot easier than many people think, and the idea behind it is simple. White gardens are designed for a variety of reasons, not just to brighten up the night, including a love for white flowers, a desire for a clean cut flower garden and something as trivial as preferring the way the color matches the color of your home.

Whatever your reasons are for wanting a white garden, here are some tips for designing and caring for your very own. I have included many of my favorite varieties of white flowers as well as other ideas that you might want to try in your own white garden.

Shrubs and Bushes
American Elder is native to North America and grows well in almost all of its hardy zones, making it a great addition to a white garden. Even though American Elder gets a bad name for its sometimes unruly growth, I think its wayward branches make it ideal for a garden with a natural setting. With the right space, and a well chosen garden location, this shrub does very well and adds more than its white flowers in the way of interest to a garden. The branches create low, arching swaths of color and berries, deep colored foliage in both summer and fall all add their own degree of interest.

Vertical Growers
Vines and other vertical growers are a great way to add height and interest to a garden. Less obvious, but more artistic and practical reasons for adding vertical growers are to add interest to empty areas, block off the view of part of your yard, or to hide less desirable aspects of your yard or home. Whatever the reason, some of the most obvious vertical growers include climbing roses, clematis vines, and jasmine.

White varieties of vertical climbers include Mlle Cecile Brunner and Sally Holmes climbing roses, Western White Clematis, Autumn Clematis, and Huldine Clematis are all sturdy varieties and grow at different times in the season so determine when you need flowering color the most and choose among them. Jasmine is another great option and it has the added benefit of adding a beautiful fragrance to fill your garden.

Besides climbing vines you can add tall ornamental grasses and other tall flowering plants, such as yucca, cleome and gladiolus. All of these come in white varieties and add lots of interest. White pampas grass is especially fun and always a crowd pleaser at the end of the summer when bushy white blooms top the tall stalks of grass.

Flowering Middlers
In the middle ground of your white garden is where you will have the most variety in flowers available to you. It is also where you get to decide how you want to design your white garden, as far as the types of plants go. It is possible to go entirely native with wildflowers and native annuals, tropical, with exotic plant choices or Victorian, among many other choices.

Some of my personal favorite middle growers include Alaskan daisies, garden phlox, peonies, Shasta daisies, foxglove, hosta and columbine. There are many other types of flowers that fit in this part of your white garden so make sure to browse the entire selection of your local garden nursery and shop for flowers that you like and those that will survive in the growing environment that you can provide.

Low Growers and Ground Covers
White ground covers are some of the more interesting and diverse varieties of flowers to add to your garden because they come in so many textures and designs. Flowers that can be included in this group are petunias, impatiens, sweet alyssum, flowering vinca and creeping phlox. All of these come in white varieties and look incredible when planted in huge masses.