Select the Right Plants, Southern Gardening TV

A lot of people admire pretty garden beds from a distance, but they don't have to confidence to try it themselves. One of the big secrets to success is simply selecting the right plants to grow. My friend Tim has never had a garden, but his interest in gardening grew from watching our Southern Gardening TV segments. In fact, last winter, we did a Southern Gardening feature from Tim's house on how to install a landscape bed. Well, look at how this landscape bed has grown. Tim has used a combination of colorful flowers and pretty foliage to produce an eye-popping bed. The front of the bed features New Look Celosia. These easy to grow plants have showy bright red plumes and attractive burgundy foliage, and they will thrive throughout the hot summer growing season. Currently the real showstoppers are the Irish Eyes Rudbeckia. These tall perennials produce an abundance of golden yellow flowers having bright green center cones. These beautiful flowers will be produced throughout the entire summer. Foliage gives this bed a lot more color. Purple Heart is an attractive ground cover. This relative of the spiderwort dominates the back part of this landscape bed. Other flashes of color come from the lime and burgundy Henna sun coleus. And don't forget this combination of green and purple sweet potato vine. The final show-piece in this landscape bed is the whiskey barrel planter sitting on top of an old pine stump. Tim used the ever-popular thriller, filler, and spiller formula to fill his barrel. The thriller plant is blue butterfly plant. Red and rose Whopper begonia are the fillers, and spillers are the spreading calibrachoa. All of these plants have been featured through the years on Southern Gardening, and all are proven performers to make gardening easy for you. I'm horticulturist Gary Bachman for Southern Gardening.