How To Create A Beautiful Spring Garden Like Fixer Upper's Joanna Gaines

If you've ever seen home renovation and design expert Joanna Gaines' garden, you'd instantly know why so many people look to her for gardening advice. At many points throughout the year, it's full to the brim with romantic trellises, overflowing vegetable beds, and blooms in all colors, shapes, and sizes. But how does Gaines plan out the perfect spring garden year after year? She uses printouts to map out her beds and mixes in both new blooms with her favorite plants.

When it comes to experimentation, Gaines can get a little nervous. She claims that uncertainty can put her on edge, so she sometimes struggles to step out of her comfort zone when it comes to her garden — something that's unpredictable by nature. To encourage herself to expand the types of plants she's familiar with growing, Gaines uses her main flower and vegetable beds to plant everything she already knows how to care for. The outer beds, however, are what Gaines uses to plant blooms that she's never grown before. This way, even if the new comers don't have a successful growing season, she'll still have a beautiful garden full of beds that are guaranteed to flourish. 

With this in mind, pick plants that are simple and straightforward to be the highlight of your garden. Leave the striking but fickle blooms for the outer edges, just in case they don't work out. Like Gaines, you might also want to opt for raised beds, which will give you more control over your garden's soil. Even Martha Stewart ditched her traditional veggie gardening method in favor of raised beds.

One of the best tips Joanna Gaines has for planting the perfect garden is to print life-size photos of every flower you plan on growing. This will help you truly visualize how the size, shape, and texture of every plant will look once your garden bed is in full bloom. When creating a garden bed, it's best to have a lot of variety with plants both tall and small or flowering and leafy. Printing pictures of the plants you want to work with can help you understand not only whether they visually work with each other, but also where each one of them should go.

For an outdoor area like Gaines', don't forget to design your garden around a cohesive color palette, too. That doesn't mean that you need to create a garden that's totally monochrome; after all, the fun of a backyard in bloom is a wide range of colors and textures. On top of being an easy way to create healthy ecosystems and bring biodiversity into your garden, areas with wide varieties of plants also fit into the relaxed gardening trend that's replacing formal landscapes. Just make sure that the hues of your flowers and foliage play off of each other effectively and pair well. This is something Gaines always keeps in mind when she's still in the planning stages of designing her garden.