Flower Show Drama: More Is Better

By Phran Novelli

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - You can do that! It's true you can't force a year's worth of trees, flowers and shrubs in your yard to open in one week like they do at the Flower Show (and you wouldn't want everything to bloom all at once and be bare the rest of the year anyway), but what you can do to replicate a lot of that Flower Show drama is to plant many more of the same thing. Don't plant just one or two when 10 will do just as nicely.

Repetition is a big part of what wows you at the Flower Show and really, in any great garden. And you can do it with trees, like planting a grove of crabapples or native dogwoods. Or shrubs; why plant only one winterberry holly when your front path can hold a hedge?

Or, you can paint a perennial garden with great swaths of color - like large areas of baptisia, coneflowers and goldenrod that come back year after year. And, instead of mixing 20 different kinds of annuals, try getting full flats of just one or two kinds or colors, for that intense Flower Show impact.

Plant. Water. And repeat.