How to Create a White Flower Garden This Spring (2024)

Pick a Location

White gardens are used primarily to make otherwise dark spaces pop, so choose a shady part of your garden for the biggest impact. Make a sun map of your garden to find out exactly how many hours of sunlight said section receives so you can select plants accordingly.

Also consider this: Dark-colored backgrounds—dark greens, especially, such as an ivy-covered wall—make white really stand out.

Choose Plants for Year-Round Splendor

If you want your white garden to wow year-round, you must fill it with a mix of annuals and perennials. Choose flowers that bloom at different times of the year, too, so you have a steady flow of blooms. White flowers tend to turn an unsightly shade of brown when they die, so mixing spring bloomers with summer bloomers and evergreens is the key to distracting the eye from plants past their prime.

Plant Climbers First

Height variation is important to any well-rounded garden. Unless you're using your white flower garden specifically as a border (for a walkway, etc.), then you'll probably want some height in the back. Nothing does this like climbing plants.

Climbing hydrangeas, star jasmine, and moonflowers are great for growing on walls and trellises in a white garden.

Add in Evergreens

Evergreens serve a couple of purposes in a white garden: They create shape and texture diversity, and they give the garden life during winter, after summer blooms have died. You could choose an on-theme variety like blue-star juniper, whose foliage is a silvery-blue color, or a traditional evergreen shrub like boxwood. The deeper the green, the better its contrast with white.

Introduce Your Low-Growing Bloomers

Now for the filler. Low-growing bloomers are going to help you achieve the most white in your garden. Sprinkle some perennials in with your annuals for variation (and to reduce maintenance). And don't be afraid of a bit of repetition. Patterns, after all, help establish visual rhythm and movement in a flower garden.

Because you're forgoing color variety here, it's important to create variety instead with shape, size, and texture. Mix large and bulbous flowers (peonies, roses, and camellias, for example) with dainty daisylike blooms. Intermix flowering bushes with leggier plants, and so forth.

Top It Off With More Texture

Create more depth and dimension to your white garden with ornamental grasses. Again, you could choose varieties that suit the theme—such as silvery Stachys or white feather hostas (not exactly a grass but rather a foliage plant)—or you could stick with your standard deep-green grasses for added color contrast.

Deadhead, Deadhead, Deadhead!

Any flower garden requires a fair bit of maintenance. In a white flower garden, your biggest battle (besides, perhaps, getting flowers to thrive in shade) will be keeping the brown out. Expect to deadhead flowers regularly—this encourages the plant to bloom more, anyway. The best time to deadhead is before the blooms die completely. When a plant stops flowering, cut it to the ground.