Mailbox Garden Ideas

A formal mailbox garden is a good choice for a traditional home. These homes have symmetrical windows, columns and other architectural elements. Create symmetry in your garden by repeating plant colors, shapes and sizes. Mounded mums, backed by neatly clipped evergreen shrubs, provide bright color through the fall. Replace them in the spring with Knock Out roses or masses of annuals in similar colors. Annuals are plants that last for one season. Boxwoods are easy to prune into curved or straight hedges and borders.

For an informal mailbox garden, use plants that pop with color and personality. Try a combination of orange and yellow kalanchoes, hot pink petunias and sunny marigolds. To care for a small area typical of an informal style, you just need a watering can and slow-release fertilizer.

Use taller plants near the mailbox post and shorter ones in front. Planting them this way gives the bed a layered look and adds interest.

Vincas, celosia, dwarf zinnias and begonias suit a sunny spot. For shade, try coleus, impatiens, balsam and lobelia, or use hostas for their handsome leaves. In the fall, replace the summer annuals with pansies, mums and ornamental kale.

A combination of annuals with perennials that come back each year makes a lovely cottage-style mailbox garden. Try silvery-gray lamb’s ears for spikes of lavender blooms. Gold daylilies add contrast and low-growing white candytuft brings an eye-catching mix of color and height.

You can also use indigenous, deer-resistant species like California poppies, ornamental grasses or herbs.

Fragrant flowers like roses, heliotropes, lavender, phlox and dianthus add a mix of color and smell that will delight the senses. Use sweetpeas as a climbing vine to create height, color and scent.

For a fresh take on a colorful climber, try a spring or summer-blooming clematis, Carolina jessamine, autumn clematis, moonflower vine or Lonicera species (honeysuckle).

A mailbox in a small space like a front porch can add visual appeal too. Try a container garden for a low-maintenance way to add seasonal color to your entrance. Anchor your bed with a small evergreen like a boxwood topiary or dwarf blue spruce.

Next, add color with cool-weather, early-blooming bulbs like crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils and tulips. Pansies and trailing annuals like the jasmine nightshade, sweet potato vine and nasturtiums add texture and color from spring into summer. Change out your annuals for chrysanthemums in early autumn for continual color.

For a mailbox garden with pizzazz, plant these low-maintenance perennials. They’re heat-tolerant and resist drought.

• Clematis
• Sedum
• Coreopsis (Tickseed)
• Coneflower
• Black-Eyed Susan
• Rosemary
• Ornamental grasses

Switch out annuals for seasonal interest and color. If your mailbox garden is in a shady area, read plant tags and choose annuals that do well in partial or full shade. In full sun, you can choose hardy petunias and marigolds in spring and summer, then switch them out for mums and pansies in fall.

• Pansies
• Petunias
• Calibrachoa
• Marigolds
• Mums