Flowers bloom in many different colors and at different times of the season. Because of this, it is always a good idea to plan your garden before you put a shovel to the ground. This allows you to design your garden to achieve excellent color balance and appearance throughout the temperate season.
There are many ways you can plan your garden. One approach is to design your garden plan on a sheet of grid paper, using gardening books to determine colors, heights, and blooming periods of the plants you want to place in your garden. This doesn't always allow you to visualize your garden in color, however. A second approach is to collect different gardening magazines that have color pictures of plants that you like. Make cutouts of the plants and position them on a piece of paper, creating a garden collage. The disadvantage to this method is that you destroy your gardening magazines. If you are computer savvy, an excellent way to plan your garden is to purchase a landscaping program that allows you to plan your garden in three dimensions. Some of these programs even create animations to show how your plant choices will bloom over time.