7 Spring Flowers to Grow in your Garden

7 spring flowers that would be great to add to your own backyard garden. Plus a few berries that flower too.

As spring approaches I so look forward to all the spring flowers coming up. In the early spring it so nice to have fresh growth after a long winter. It makes everything seem more cheerful.

If you are looking to add a few new flowers to your garden, then these 7 spring flowers to grow would be a great addition to any garden.

I’m sharing what’s blooming in our garden this month. I hope it can give you a few ideas of flowers you might want to add to your own garden.

These recommendations come from where I live in the Pacific Northwest. We usually have a cool, wet spring. I’m in zone 8 so if you are in a similar zone then these flowers will grow great for you too.

All of the flowers and berries I’m sharing come back year after year. You can plant them once and keep enjoying them for years to come. They are perennials.

While I enjoy having a few annuals in our flower garden, perennials are where you get your money’s worth. They cost more to purchase but you’ll get years of enjoyment.

Perennials also grow bigger year after year. So be sure to give them room to grow to their full size.

Spring Blooms in the Garden

The first few flowers below are ones that bloom early in the spring from March to April. The rest are in bloom during May. I love how you can plant a few varieties to enjoy early spring flowers and late spring flowers too.

These early spring blooming flowers are bulbs. They need to be planted in the fall or very early winter months. So you really do need to plan ahead.

Put it on your calendar to shop for daffodils, hyacinths, and tulips in September. Then you can put them into the garden in the fall for a wonderful display of early spring flowers.

Our daffodils can start showing up as early as January if it’s not too cold. The green leaves will pop up and then the flower heads will form. But we don’t normally see the actual flowers until March.

But it’s nice to have the green growth before then. It does brighten up the garden.

Daffodils can be pretty short lived here. If they are in full bloom at the same time we have heavy rain they won’t last. The poor things get so heavy with rain they fall over and many of the stems will bent and brake. But when this happens I do bring in a few and wash the mud off of them so we can enjoy them inside.

But on some years when we don’t have huge downpours of 2 inches of rain at a time. They will stay beautiful for a while.

There are many varieties of daffodils. Be sure to do a little research to see which you like best. There is small cup, large cup daffodils, doubles this is where the middle is doubled instead of one cup in the middle.

I like the Poeticus the best, they have large white petals and a small cup that is rimmed with red or green. We have a few and they come up a little later in the spring. They are so pretty and tend to stand up to the rain better.

Hyacinths stand up better to the rain than the daffodils and the smell is so wonderful. They are very fragrant. You can smell them as you walk by. The ones we have are dabbled with pink and white blooms are so pretty too.

But you can get other colors too.

I tell myself each year I need to plant more of them and this year I planted more. I picked up a few mixed color packages of bulbs last fall. So now I wait for them to bloom to see what colors we will have.

Spring Flower for Your Backyard Garden

All of these spring flower below are ones I grow in our backyard garden. Some are full shade and some are part to full sun. So you can pick which ones will work in your backyard garden.

Bleeding Heart

In the early spring we see these shade loving plants start to emerge from the ground. Their lacy green leaves unfold first, then the spikes with flower emerge later.

I first saw them around the waterfalls in the gorge. The blooms look like little hearts with a teardrop falling from the bottom.

They are a native plant to the Pacific NW and so pretty. But they can really spread if you don’t dead head them.

But if you want to have quite a few of them in the garden. You can purchase one plant and as they spread you can move the new plants to other areas in the garden.

I love them because they are easy to grow and look so pretty. Not only are the flowers beautiful but the leaves are lacy and look so pretty. The flowers stay most of the spring but the lacy leaves remain into summer.

These are a great addition to a shade garden.

Flowering Trees

Spring is also a great time for flowing trees. In the early spring you’ll see cherry trees in bloom. Which I have a love hate relationship with. I’m allergic to the pollen but love their beauty. So I admire them from afar.

Another really pretty flowering tree is Dogwoods. They bloom a little later in the spring. They have a beautiful flower to them and can range in color. We have the pink variety but there are all white ones too.

We have pink dogwoods at our house and the neighbor has white. We get to enjoy both colors this way.

In the fall the dogwood trees will produce a red berry. This attracts the cedar waxing birds to our garden each fall.

So these trees have beautiful blooms in the spring, lovely leaves in the summer for shade. And berries to attract the birds in the fall. They are a great tree to have in the garden.

Fruit trees also bloom during the spring usually in April and May. We don’t have any fruit trees in our garden but my aunt does. She has a plum, pear, and apple tree.

They are so pretty when they bloom in the spring. Then late summer to early fall there is fruit to be harvested.

Spring Ground Covers

We have a few ground covers  in our yard. When we moved into our home there were a couple of ground covers already established and they have only spread since then.

Garden Phlox

We have a nice patch of phlox near our light pole. This little plant looks like it’s a carpet of flowers when it’s in full bloom.

We have a lavender phlox but they come in many colors. You can get them in pink, rose, red, orange and white. Any would make a great addition to your garden where you’d like a ground cover.

When the blooms are done, you are left with a patch of light green leaves that look pretty all summer long.

Lithodora

We have another ground cover that over the years has mingled nicely with other ground covers. When in bloom the Lithodora blue blooms really brightens up the garden. I love how it looks like a sea of blue against the background of it’s green leaves.

Plus the Lithodora is quite popular with our hummingbirds so we see them visiting the flowers often. If you are looking for a spring ground cover to attract bees and hummingbirds consider adding Lithodora to your flower garden.

Tulips

Our last flower is also a favorite of my husband’s, it’s tulips. We have a few tulips in our garden but they are pretty to look at. I always wished we had more and this year I planted about 30 more.

We have a pink variety and a yellow tulip with a red stripe. They are both beautiful. I added a few red and white tulips this year. As well as a few of Fritillaria ova-vulpis. They are tulips but the heads hang down.

While we love tulips, but we often have a rainy spring, so once they open the heads will fill with water and can bend and break the stems. That is something to think about when planting these beautiful flowers.

Food Producing Blooms

That’s it for our flowers but we do have a few berries that bloom in the spring. Our blueberries and strawberry are beautiful in the spring.

Blueberries

The blueberries have such a beautiful blossom on them with the dark pink and whitish tone. The flowers are as beautiful as the berries are yummy.

We grow the pink lemonade variety. The plants are beautiful almost year round. In the spring they have green leaves with a tinge of red. The blooms come on and as you can see in the photo, they are so spectacular.

In late summer, we have delicious berries to harvest. And when harvest season is over the leaves turn a beautiful reddish color that stays almost till spring.

It’s truly a 3-4 season plant. Only bear for a few weeks a year.

Strawberries

Strawberries are another berry that is great to grow in the garden. You can have a dedicated space for them in a raised bed or grown them in containers.

They have green leaves year round and in the spring produce beautiful small white flowers. They are always the first berry to bloom in the garden.

If you’d like to add strawberries to your garden, these tips will help you to grow sweet strawberries in your backyard garden. If you have a bed that isn’t producing well, try to prune them. I do it each year to keep our strawberries producing well.

It’s nice to see the strawberry blooms on the plants. When I see them come on in the spring it gives me hope for yummy strawberries in the next few months.

If you are looking to get more flowers into the garden any of these would be a great addition.

They will come back year after year. They produce beautiful flowers in the spring and some produce food too.

I hope you’ve found a new flower you’ll love.

If you are a vegetable gardener, now is the time to get to planning. And my Seed to Harvest Garden Journal is perfect for spring planning and planting all the way through harvest time. Find out more by clicking the photo below.