Every Whimsical Garden Needs These Staple Flowers

Like our homes, our gardens reflect our tastes, styles, and design preferences. Yards where everything looks tidy and well-manicured are one option, but some of us feel more at home letting whimsy reign. And while you can add a touch of whimsy to your plants with decorations, there are some flowers that embody a whimsical aesthetic all on their own, filling outdoor spaces with lighthearted joy. If you're the type of gardener who feels at home taking a more fanciful approach to landscaping your yard, staple flowers that will fit in perfectly include foxgloves, cosmos, alliums, and a few other choice selections.

You probably know whimsy when you see it without necessarily needing to put the concept into words. A whimsical landscaping approach is one of the ways to put a maximalist spin on your garden: It embraces the fanciful, playful, and unexpected. The flowers you incorporate may look magical or unusual. Colors may surprise you; you may notice funny shapes or bloom arrangements — but above all, the garden should make you smile. It's the perfect opportunity to grow flowers that might seem somewhat out of place in a more manicured yard.

Your whimsical garden needs to confound expectations for what's expected in a flowering bed, replacing tidy, low-growing bedding plants with tall flowers that have spikes covered with gorgeous blooms. There are some lovely candidates to fill this role in your yard. Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) are perennials in USDA Hardiness Zones 4 to 9 that have tall spikes of big, tubular or funnel-shaped blooms in shades that include pink, purple, and cream. Delphinium (Delphinium elatum) is another perennial that provides a towering floral display in shades of blue, pink, and other shades, and is hardy in zones 3 to 7. And don't forget hollyhocks (Alca rosea), the biennial or annual flowers whose cup-shaped blooms come in all sorts of cheerful colors.

There is also an assortment of bobbing flowers that belong in a whimsical garden — plants with blooms that seem to be balanced at the ends of long stalks. Light and airy, cosmos (Cosmos bipinnatus) are annuals whose saucer-shaped blooms dance in the breeze, supported by delicate stems. And visitors to your yard will feel delight when they see ornamental alliums such as giant onion (Allium giganteum), with its 6-inch purple flower heads posed atop thin, 4-foot stalks. Alliums are hardy in zone 5 to 8 gardens. Once you've started to grow these fanciful floral staples, don't forget you can also add whimsy to your backyard with the trees that are already there by adding adorable fairy gardens at their bases.