With some planning and a few of the many white or night-bloomers available, you can create a moon garden that will light up your nights be it summer, fall or spring. Even if there's no moonlight, or a tree canopy blots it out, there's often enough ambient, reflected light to make your garden glow alive.
A Moon Garden Is One Of These Special Gardens.
Moon gardens are designed to be viewed at night. Most moon gardens are designed with special walkways so that people can stroll through to view the garden and some keep them enclosed through some sort of screen or fence. Special lighting is often used, such as solar lighting. Solar lighting gives off a warm glow that isn’t as bright as normal household lighting and it creates just the right ambiance that people are looking for when designing their moon gardens. You may also want to use special plants, such as those whose flowers only open at night. Designed correctly, a moon garden will quickly become the talk of the neighborhood and one shouldn’t be surprised if their moon garden design brings a crowd every night when the sun goes down.
The Blending Of Fragrance Flowers
In addition to the flowers that only bloom at night, there are other flowers that people love to include in their moon garden designs because of the nighttime fragrance they give off. These flowers include the types known as the Sweet Autumn Clematis, the Blooming Jasmine as well as the Flowering Tobacco.
The sweet, heavy scent of flowering tobacco (Nicotiana alata) is most evident at night you will want to use the white-flowering variety. Summersweet (Clethra alnifolia), a mid-sized rotund shrub, can fill the whole garden with fragrance in July and August. The late-summer flowers of night jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum) are inconspicuous, but their fragrance is heavenly. Try to avoid competing aromas or too many heavy scents by staggering periods of bloom or by planting in different spots in the garden.
The Moon Flower
There is a certain flower which is perfect for any moon garden design. The Moon Flower begins with spiraled buds during the day. At night, the six inch wide white flowers open, revealing a wonderful fragrance. Ask your local garden center if they carry the Moon Flower to be included in your moon garden design. If they don’t carry it, they may know where you can get your hands on some. No moon garden should go without this wonderful nighttime flower known as the Moon Flower.
Another great idea to include in your moon garden design is to get flowers with a silvery tint to their flowers so as to effectively reflect the moonlight. Done properly and these types of flowers make your moon garden glow.
The choice is up to you as to what you include in your moon garden design but you should keep in mind that it should have the desired effect. You’ll know once you have it right because once the sun goes down, your moon garden will seem to have a life all its own.
Planning For The Seasons
For a moon garden that glows more than three seasons, choose a variety of white annuals and perennials, also consider shrubs and trees that flower at different times. Snowdrops, freesia, white tulips, creamy daffodils, dogwood, fothergilla, viburnums, spirea and rhododendrons will brighten up early-to late-spring nights. Bugbane, monkshood and boltonia (Boltonia asteroides 'Snowbank') bloom from late summer to fall. Shasta daisy (Chrysanthemum x superbum) flower from early summer to frost. The white bellflower (campanula parsicifolia 'Alba'), baby's breath, astilbe and falsespires (sorbaria sorbifolia) flower in summer.
