Looking for a way to add some eye-catching beauty to your landscape? Dress up your yard with a beautiful mailbox garden. With the right plants and a bit of mulch, the space around your mailbox can deliver colorful, compelling blooms and even a few vase-worthy flowers. Here are five ideas to help get you started.
1. Formal Designs
Formal mailbox gardens are nice choices for traditional homes with symmetrical columns, windows and other formal architectural elements. You can echo this design symmetry by repeating plant sizes, shapes and colors. Consider mounded mums backed by some neatly trimmed evergreen shrubs for some bright color during the autumn. You can then replace the mums with roses or massed similar-colored annuals. Complete the look by pruning boxwoods into straight or curved hedges and borders.
2. Informal Designs
For informal mailbox landscaping, consider plants that pack a punch of personality and vivid color. Good options include hot pink petunias, yellow and orange kalanchoes, and bright, sunny marigolds. Place taller vegetation near the mailbox post and shorter plants upfront, so they won’t be overshadowed.
Begonias, dwarf zinnias, celosia and vincas are great for sunny spots. For shady areas, try lobelia, balsam, impatiens and coleus. You can also plant hostas for their lovely foliage. In the fall, replace your annuals with ornamental kales or pansies.
Easy to maintain, this sort of mailbox garden requires a little slow-release fertilizer and some regular watering.
3. Cottage Designs
You can create a beautiful cottage-style mailbox garden with the right combination of perennials and annuals. Consider blending some silvery lamb’s-ears with their lavender blooms and purple petunias, pink Torenia or golden daylilies.
Get a similar cottage feel by blending plants of varying textures, colors and heights. You can also use native plants, ornamental grasses, poppies, sage, basil and other edible herbs, along with sweet peas, dianthus, phlox, lavender, heliotropes and roses.
For a lovely, colorful climber for your mailbox, swap out clematis for a moonflower vine, Carolina jessamine, morning glory, autumn clematis, or Lonicera honeysuckle species. You can also repaint your mailbox with a flattering, contrasting or compatible color to help highlight your new plants.
4. Big, Bold, Lush Designs
Have enough water to support a lush, green landscape? Foliage-only elephant ears create a nice dense tropical look, while burgundy castor bean produces inconspicuous flowers with bright red seed pods. You can also add some canna lilies or other large annuals to create some temporary drama while other vegetation has yet to bloom. For some eye-catching flowers that love intense summer heat, consider adding some big, bold sunflowers.
5. Annuals and Perennials
You can add compelling intrigue to your mailbox landscape by switching out annuals for seasonal colors. If your little garden is in a shaded area, be sure to read plant labels and select plants that flourish in full or partial shade. For full-sun spaces, you can plant hardy marigolds and petunias in the spring and swap them out for pansies and mums in the autumn.
If you’re looking to add pizzazz to your mailbox garden, consider planting some nice low-maintenance perennials. For best results, go for some drought-resistant, heat-tolerant options, such as daylily, rosemary, black-Eyed Susan, coneflower, Coreopsis, sedum, clematis and ornamental grasses.
Your mailbox garden can be as simple or elaborate as your creativity allows. With that said, if you really want a spectacular landscape, you need input from seasoned professionals.
Whatever you do, try to keep things low maintenance. Even if you love to garden, you should keep things as manageable as possible. An elaborate mailbox garden can be tough to manage during the dry, hot summer months. The landscape around a mailbox can also face especially harsh growing conditions due to its location in your yard. Car fumes, ice-melting chemicals and radiating heat from nearby asphalt can also damage and even kill weak garden specimens. It helps to get advice from professionals who can help you choose plants that will survive and flourish in Colorado’s challenging weather.
At RMPS Landscaping in Castle Rock, we offer a wide variety of landscaping services, from plants to stonework and hardscaping, sod, trees and elaborate, full-scale landscape renovations. Our experienced experts will work with you to understand your preferences and come up with a plan that meets your unique needs. Contact our team to find out how we can help turn your vision into a beautiful reality.
