The bitter cold from a few weeks back took a toll on our cool-season color. Odds are that you’re about to make some significant upgrades to get ready for the growing season ahead. This is a fun topic, so let’s delve into the primary steps of getting the most out of your landscaping color.

Determine where you want to use color. Perhaps you’re thinking of flowerbeds to flank the house or plantings that could stand on their own in front of shrubs out in the landscape. These larger beds will give you the chance to showcase many types of annual and perennial color for a year ‘round display.

On the other hand, you may just want to highlight an entry or patio with decorative containers fitted with colorful flowers or foliage and positioned where they’ll draw viewers’ eyes to focal points in your gardens. Container gardens are excellent ways for folks with physical challenges to scale it all back to more manageable proportions. We can still have the show without all the work. It’s easier to change out the potting soil in a few large containers than it is to spade up a long bed. Elevate those containers by putting them on plant stands. Any plant becomes a star when it’s put on a pedestal. Hang a few from the eaves. Let them frame a beautiful view.

Even your woody landscape plants bring their own colors to your design. Whether it’s various shades of green or variegation, or seasonal flowers or fruit, these plants add the sense of change to their surroundings. Just as two quick examples, it’s hard to imagine landscapes in Texas without redbuds or crape myrtles.

Think of the various “rooms” of your landscape. You certainly do so with the inside of your house. And, while you may have one common unifying color that ties everything together throughout the indoors, each room may have its own set of colors.

The same thing applies when you work with the outdoors except those color schemes can actually change with the seasons. You can feature the bright, cheerful colors of springtime, then the cooling shades of the summer. Fall brings its own set of rich hues, and winter finds us looking for ways to brighten otherwise drab surroundings.

As the seasons move from one to the next, you’ll need to be planning for your sequence of colors so that you don’t have stragglers left over from the past. Again, that’s one of the nice things about gardening in containers. It’s easier and quicker to change out the color in a large patio pot than it is in an entire garden bed.

Professional designers change out the color in their landscapes at least a couple of times every year. You’ll have one change for the cool months of November through April and another to go the distance from late April up to the first frost of fall. By buying transplants in four-inch and quart pots you’ll have almost instant color. In fact, for my container plantings I even look for full hanging baskets. I transplant them out of the baskets and into the large pots — a dazzling show in a moment.

This is a good time to stress the importance of choosing the most dependable types of plants for your settings. Do your homework ahead of time. Not all plants will look as beautiful as they do in the national magazines and seed catalogs. Watch what others do locally. Ask questions of your favorite Texas Certified Nursery Professionals.

One tip that I’ll pass on based on several decades of helping North Texas gardeners: don’t plant perennials solely because they sound like they would be less work for you. They will not. Perennial gardens require careful planning to ensure a continuous sequence of color. Most perennials, you see, are only in flower for three or four weeks each year. Once they quit blooming, they’re less than spectacular, so you’ll need something else to pick up the slack. To keep a perennial garden running at full speed you’ll need a sequence of 15 or 20 types of plants to provide pockets of color from spring until frost. And, once your perennial garden has been planted, all the digging and reworking of the soil will have to be done by hand. You’ll never have the garden completely empty again.

In all fairness, annual flowers and foliage provide the biggest cumulative show for the bucks. Where those perennials are at peak for a few weeks, good annuals are showy for three to six months. Your biggest challenge will come in choosing types that can handle Texas soils and weather, and that’s where the nursery professional can be of great help.

Finally, and to sum it all up, “simple” is always in style. You don’t need massive numbers of plants or giant beds to surround your house. Five or six types of annuals or long-flowering perennials strategically planted can be all that you’ll need to put on quite a show for months at a time.