Designing a White Herb Garden

White is one of the most common color of flowers found among herbs, blending well with the many shades of green that make up the rest of the leafy plants. Even though white not be considered the most interesting flower option, it does create an interesting and serene cacophony of light and dark zones in a garden. For an added dose of effect, a white herb garden will not only add beauty to a home during the day, but come night time the garden will essentially glow.

If the thought of a white garden is interesting to you, then a white herb garden will please both in appearance and scent because almost all herbs are highly aromatic.

Designing a White Herb Garden

Prepare the Garden Soil

Any garden bed needs to have soil that is suited to the plants that you are going to add to it. Since you are going to create a white herb garden, ensure that the soil is well drained, mixed in with a little compost matter and in indirect sunlight where plants will be able to grow. Herbs, even flowering ones, do not require the best soil to be successful, but they do require some sun and enough sunlight to create their blooms.

Plan for Areas

Because the white herbs that are most commonly used as flowers are so different from each other, plan out your garden in zones where each can live without disrupting others. Always plant from the back to the front, leaving the shortest plants near the border where they can be seen and appreciated. Depending on what style garden you intend to design, you can pack flowers into each zone or plant them out for future growth and division.

Cover Each Growing Season

Pick out herbs that are at their best during different times, so that you always have white flowers or interesting vines showing up at some point of the year. The white Madonna Lily will pop up out of the ground at the beginning of spring, but its flowers won’t bloom until June. Masterwort is a popular medicinal herb, but its pale white flowers bloom right away in the spring when the rest of the garden will still be white. By adding one plant that is traditionally known to bloom during different periods, you can be sure that your garden will always be in bloom.

Tall White Herbs

To create the background of the garden, choose a couple tall white herbs that bloom profusely. Rosa Rugosa is a great choice for covering fences or walls with its dense leaf coverage. Its stems rise high above the rest of the flowers you will be planting and its blooms of flowers sit delicately along its stems. Foxglove shoots straight up to the sky and forms a thick stalk that is filled on all sides with beautiful white flowers. This herb is great for attracting bees and hummingbirds.

Bushy White Herbs

To fill in the middle ground and border, use white herbs that are bushier and display blooms in profuse masses to add as much color as possible. Feverfew, Borage, and Lady’s Mantle are all herbs that can provide hundreds of white flowers on each plant and create fields of white. Lady’s mantle and Feverfew are self seeders which is great for planting on a budget, but you may need to ensure that they do not self seed too much and overtake the new garden bed in the future.