Decorating Your Wood Porch Swing With No Fuss Flowers

When you surround your wood porch swing with no-fuss flowers, you gain two advantages. You add color and visual appeal to your outdoor space. You also choose plants that will flourish without expensive fertilizers and inordinate amounts of your time. Particularly for beginning gardeners or those who can't seem to keep plants alive, these no-fuss flowers make good choices for decorating a wood porch swing. Plant them in bordering flower beds or matching wood planters.

The first two flowers, astilbe and hosta, thrive in shade or just partial sun. Although some varieties may survive full sun in cooler climates, these plants tend to scorch in areas of full sunlight.

Delicate bunches of small flowers fill the stalk and give astilbe a feathery appearance when in bloom. Astilbe usually appears in shades of white, red, pink, or lavender. It can grow as tall as three feet, and it generally spreads over time, so you may wish to give it room to grow. If you don't want the flower bed near your wood porch swing to look bare when you first plant astilbe, you can always surround it with annual flowers. In addition to shade, astilbe also loves moist soil. If your soil is dry, you can add humus or similar material to enhance the soil's ability to retain moisture.

Hosta is another shade-loving perennial that survives well without much care. Like astilbe, the hosta also prefers moist soil. Tall stalks emerge from a mass of beautiful foliage. The leaves may be deep or pale green, even a bluish-gray. Often, a white band tips the outer edge of the hosta's leaves. Each stalk may contain several blooms, usually white. The open blooms look like funnels. Some varieties remain small, but others may grow to a height of five feet and width of four feet.

If the planting area around your wood porch swing enjoys high exposure to sunlight, you will need sun-loving flowers. Peonies and columbines both fall in this category of no-fuss flowers.

The peony is a lovely flower that you usually see in varying shades of pink, red, or white. However, you can also find other colors, such as yellow or even purple. They look like they contain two layers of petals, the inner layer with ruffled edges, and the outer layer with smooth edges. Peonies can grow quite large--up to four feet in both height and width. Despite their sweet appearance, peonies are tough flowers that can survive neglect.

Finally, columbine enjoys full or partial sunlight and moist soil. This beauty commonly appears in a wide range of colors--white, yellow, pink, red, peach, and even blue. Two distinct layers of petals form the bloom. The inner layer lies close to the center, while the outer layer spikes out in a wide, star-shaped outline. The two layers of petals may display the same color or contrasting ones. Columbine grows up to four feet tall and two feet wide.

Astilbe, hosta, peony, and columbine are not the only no-fuss flowers that make attractive accents for your wood porch swing. Astilbe, peony, and columbine, however, do offer the added benefit of being deer-resistant plants. And all four are hardy plants that can withstand less-than-ideal conditions. Perhaps these flowers can serve as a good starting point to build arrangements that will increase your satisfaction and enjoyment of your wood porch swing.