Gardening Project | Flower Border Around The Backyard Trees

Our backyard trees faced a bit of neglect as I focussed on my front garden beds and flowers closer to the house. Over the past two years, the grass started to cover the mulch, and the trees looked boring and lonely. I wanted to add a pop of flowers in the backyard, so I decided to build a little butterfly & bee flower garden around them. 

I love how they turned out, and I can’t wait for them to come back this year! They brought me so much joy last summer, and I always enjoyed taking my coffee outside with me to deadhead, water, and just stare at them. They attracted the most beautiful monarch butterflies, hummingbirds, and bumble bees. In September, the brightest yellow finches were all over the seeds of the coneflowers, and I loved watching them.  I feel like I’m doing something good whenever I plant pollinating attractors.

Creating a Butterfly and Bee Flower Garden

This would be a great project if you have some areas by your house that needs a little TLC! It doesn’t require a lot of work, money, or landscaping experience. You can customize this by choosing flowers you like, different landscaping stones, and the shapes of the garden beds. 

These flower bed gardens would be a cute project to do with your kids and a great way to teach them about plants and pollination. Within minutes of planting, it started attracting all the bumble bees and butterflies. And don’t worry, those big and loud bumble bees will not hurt you! They are too busy working.
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I first headed to Lowes Garden Center to pick up garden soil (the potting mix was for my porch pots) and landscaping edging stones. The stone comes in curved for a round garden bed and also straight for rectangular beds.

The total for the stones came to around $70.00 for 40 of them. This is one of those purchases you’ll only have to make once.

The total for the four bags of garden soil came to $35.00, and you do not have to buy mulch, but you can if you’d like! I ended up adding mulch to the bed after they all died out in the late fall of this year.
Flowers, summer gardening, flowers around tree, garden bed, coneflowers, annuals, perennials, flower bed around tree, tree flowers, full sun flowers, gardening south Carolina, gardening around the tree, backyard gardening, garden blogger, garden blog, flower garden, butterfly and bee garden, butterfly garden, bee and butterfly flowers, lantana, flower garden, gardening, landscaping, flowers around the tree, whimsical flowers, flower garden in backyard, easy flower gardening tips, garden blogger, gardening in North Carolina, south Carolina gardening, fort mill sc, garden blog You can save some money by purchasing your flowers or seeds at Lowes, but they don’t have the variety of flowers that my local nursery has, and I love supporting their business. If you live near Charlotte or Fort Mill, stop by Wilsons Garden Center in Rock Hill, SC. I used to get coffee and head there almost every single week. I’ve purchased my flowers from them for years, and they never disappoint!

My backyard has full sun in the back where the garden beds are, so I went with full-sun perennials. One day when the trees are giant, I’ll have to transfer the flowers elsewhere since it’ll be a shady spot, but that’ll be years from now.

Purchasing perennials will save you a lot of money over the years because they come back every year, and sometimes you can split them and keep the garden going. 

If your garden area is full sun, get full sun flowers, and if it’s heavily shaded, make sure to get part-sun or full-shade. My gardening guide has a lot of flower options listed for sun/shade sections!
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If you’re wondering why our grass has chunks in these photos, it’s because it was aerated by our grass company. We had a complete grass rehab last year, which I’m hoping helped a bit with treating the grubs, which turn into the Japanese beetles that eat everything up. 

I recommend purchasing everything the day before since that takes a lot of time and work. Do the trees the next day when your energy levels are back and you’re ready to start digging(I did this a month postpartum, so I was so tired during this process! 
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The first thing I did was lay the stones around the area that I wanted to fill with flowers. This helped me create a guide for digging.