17 Landscaping With Mums Ideas: A Guide To Get You Started Right

Landscaping with mums of the Asteraceae family is a beautiful way to add color to your landscape during the fall. While mums are straightforward, getting started may be a problem. After consulting with our experts, we have collated a guide to get you started in 17 easy-to-understand tips for these Chrysanthemum genus flowers.

Our experts in the field, gathered their best ideas–which we will discuss in detail–were highlighted as the best ways to ensure you utilize your landscapes optimally when using mums. 

List of Landscaping With Mums

Colloquially known as mums, Chrysanthemums brighten your landscape when used, especially during the fall. When landscaping with mums, the key is ensuring you explore their best features. Here are the top 17 tips handpicked for you:

1. Match With Your Home

Mums come in a variety of colors. Having a central theme allows you to select the best for you. For instance, you could go with white, orange, and a touch of red.

As an added advantage, going with a theme narrows your selection process. If many options are a problem, selecting a theme saves you a lot of trouble.

If you want to step it up a notch, you can go with mums that have the same color as your house or those that complement the colors outside your home—using orange mums against a purple wall, for instance.

2. Match With You Garden

Find a color that compliments your surroundings and go with it. If you’re surrounded by dense vegetation, for instance, having mums that even out the green color is the theme. 

3. Plant In Spring

You must ensure that your mums bloom in time to produce that beautiful fall color to get the best results. Planting them sooner will see that they don’t survive the first few weeks, and the same applies if you miss the planting season.

The best time to plant mums for the fall is in Spring. The aim is to ensure they receive between six to eight hours of sunlight and adequate rainfall to thrive.

Planting sooner than Spring or later than summer means they miss adequate sunlight and rain. In addition, they experience winter, a condition that does not favor young mums at all.

4. Plant in Late Summer

If it’s summer and you missed the planting season for seeds or seedlings, you can enjoy already grown mums in the fall by buying some during the late summer and plant them.

Visit the local florist and request blossoming mums in late summer. Since they’re already blooming, they only need a few days to weeks to adapt. Buying them early in summer introduces them to the scorching summer sun. It’s important because you’ll be transplanting them. While they love sunlight, they don’t thrive in the heat. 

5. Follow the Curb

Curb appeal is an essential component in landscaping. Using them to line the curb adds to its aesthetics when planting mums.

While planning mums with the landscape to follow the curb, try accent lighting as well. It makes your flowers look even more beautiful when the sun is out.

6. A Centerpiece to Your Lawn

Lawns are known for their lush green grass. Adding mums, as a centerpiece, to your lawn introduces color to the otherwise monochromatic atmosphere lawns give an outdoor space.

Planting the mum as a centerpiece to your lawn immediately contrasts the green color; a neat visual trick to ensure your mums are well appreciated. Growing them within the lawn makes your mums stand out beautifully. 

7. Mums Around the Lawn

Mums are a beautiful way to demarcate and accent the borders of your lawn. They don’t grow into thick and tall bushes, but they don’t scatter about and are easy to maintain. See two ways you can incorporate mums around the lawn.

Utilizing the cluster yet, beautiful nature of mums is a simple yet aesthetic way of showing people where the walkway stops and where the lawn begins. Lining them around the curb of the lawn indicates a clear boundary.

For people tired of having others step on their lawns absentmindedly, using mums becomes a fashionable tool to curb such a menace.

8.Use Pots For More Options

Potted mums offer you the option of mobility. If you’re still unsure of where your mums will be by fall, using pots means you also get to enjoy plenty of options.

You can experiment all through fall. From deciding that mums belong to the window to lining them on your porch exclusively, the list is endless.

Using pots also allows you to combine landscape aesthetics with interior decoration. Mums used outdoors during the fall can be brought indoors during winter and early Spring.

9. Use Tin Pots For More Aesthetics

Aside from the advantage of mobility and options with positions, pots come with their own aesthetics.

The options are endless if you have a creative mind. You can use rustic pots to create a cozy feel or earthen pots to create that natural undisturbed-by-man environment. For theme-centered decorations, using pots for your mums eases the decoration process.

Another beautiful way to explore planting mums in pots is to make the pots at home. If you have children, this is a beautiful way to teach them landscaping while enjoying time with the family.

10. Go With the Season

You’ll find fall mums to be the most common example when dealing with these beautiful flowers. How exactly do you bring out the best from mums during the fall? Can mums only thrive during the fall?

While they thrive best during fall, mums don’t need to be used only during fall. Beautiful lilac-colored mums can be a great window collection during summer and orange-colored mums for fall.

11. Using Mums for Holidays

An excellent way to go with the season, and throw in festivities, is to decorate your mums using pumpkin-shaped pots. To bring out the color, go with orange mums. It saves you some amount of decorations during Halloween.

12. Mix With Other Plants

Mums can be mixed with other plants of the same color or with other plants that blossom in the same season.

It’s important to note that mums grow in clusters, meaning they may choke plants too close to them. You want to spread them a little bit from each other, but at the same time, not allow the mum or the other plants to outshine one another.

Several options present themselves when you consider mixing mums with other plants. You can plant your mums alongside grass or among other flowers. By planting mums with daises, for instance, the color in your yard extends into winter when daisies begin to bloom.

13. Go With One Color

A monochromatic theme doesn’t have to be dull. Evenly dispersed and placed, using one color for all your mums creates a beauty only seen in uniformity.

It’s easy to forget how beautiful one color can be in a home. A grey terrace lined with white mums, while orchids flourish in the garden, produces a serenity that vibrancy in colors may find difficult.

14. Display Mums Using Vantage Points

Sometimes, the key isn’t adding flowers to entirely new areas or creating room for them. The key is filling empty spots with flowers.

The aim is to discover places on your land that are empty or bland. How’s the swing where kids play, the mailbox, the fences, your old bicycle leaning on the tree? Take advantage of seemingly boring vantage points in your home to showcase those mums.

Get beautiful baskets or little pots to hold soil and place a few mums in them. They can be strung with ropes and used to add diversity and color. Place mums where they’ll easily be seen and appreciated. 

15. Placing Mums in the Same Height

It’s important that your flowers don’t grow wild and that they blossom when you need them. As a rule of thumb, mums should not be pinched three months before you want them displayed.

This way, you get to enjoy mums when in season and not allow zealous maintenance to rob you of those beauties during their time to shine. You can plac them all having the same height so that they would look like a little garden on their own.

16. Two-in-One

Mums grow in clusters, and you can exploit that to produce two-in-one mums. The idea is to have two mums of different colors but the same species. This way, they grow at equal rates and look alike, save the colors.

It’s an ingenious way to introduce diversity across your landscape. You can extend your creativity by incorporating three or more similar flowers with different colors into the mix.

17. Growing for the Next Year

Mums are both annual and perennial flowers, depending on the type. Although both annual and perennial mums came from the same specie, several generations of cross-pollination have presented us with two general species based on longevity. 

As you plant Garden mums in your landscape, Garden Mums last during the winter and spring back the following Spring season. If you would love to make mums a permanent part of your landscape, this option is for you. Plant them once, and good maintenance is all that’s needed.

Conclusion

Mums are beautiful ornamental crops and flowers that adorn your home in an exquisite manner. Using these flowers to add beauty to your landscape, especially during the fall when they blossom and thrive, may be a challenge. Apply the tips above, and landscaping with mums will be a breeze.

At the end of our article, you can see that with a single type of flower, you can do so much to your landscape, and so much easy and simple decorations can be placed for aesthetic purposes. Which one would you like to choose for your landscape?