7 Rainbow Garden Design Ideas: What to Plant for Pride
June is the month for LGBTQ+ Pride! No matter how you identify or who you love, Pride is a month to celebrate your life, your lovers, and your resilience in the face of challenges. Show the world you’re not afraid to be who you are with these seven rainbow designs, from gay gardener Jerad Bryant.
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The garden is a place for experimentation. It’s part of a larger ecosystem that involves local areas, your neighbors’ yards, and the spaces in between. Instead of randomly scattering plants and seeds, why not create a design that showcases who you are to the world?
You’re in luck, as flowers come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. You can find dozens of species for each rainbow color, whether you like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, or violet. Arrange the blooms in a rainbow shape, create a straight line, or fill containers with multi-color blooms.
No matter what you decide to do, your neighborhood will be better off for it. More flowers provide more food for pollinators, which in turn strengthens the ecosystem. Help the bugs and tickle your love for design with a rainbow Pride-themed garden this summer.
Make a Rainbow
Recreating a rainbow in your garden is an iconic way to show off your identity or to show your pride and stand with the LGBTQ+ community. Careful planning, planting, and maintenance will help you accomplish this design. Start by selecting plants for each color of the rainbow.
After you have your plants, rake or till sections in curves. You’ll need seven in total, one for each of the rainbow’s colors. Transplant potted seedlings or sow seeds in the curves, water them, and let them fill the space.
You’ll have a prolific, lush, and stunning rainbow of blooms in a few weeks’ time. If you sow reseeding annuals or herbaceous perennials, the design can reappear annually in spring!
Here are recommendations for each rainbow color, starting with red and ending with violet. Select your favorites from the many well-performing garden ornamentals, native plants, and wildflowers.
Red
Red flowers are prolific in the natural world! Hummingbirds love them, as do other nectar-loving pollinators like bees, butterflies, and moths. The red blooms contrast with the green leaves below, creating a lovely combination for home gardens.
Consider one or a few of these many red-blooming species:
- ‘Jacob Cline’ Bee Balm
- Amaryllis
- Tulip
- ‘Cherry Rose Jewel’ Nasturtium
- Love-Lies-Bleeding
- Western Columbine
- Red Columbine
- Rose
- ‘Rouge Royal’ Sunflower
These are some of the many red-blooming plants available for U.S. gardeners. Annuals like love-lies-bleeding will require sowing in spring, while perennials like roses and columbines will sprout without the need for resowing. Use annuals if you only intend on having the rainbow for a year, and perennials if you’d like it to last for many seasons.
Orange
Orange is also common in the landscape. Its bright hues attract insects, birds, and other beneficial critters. Many wildflowers have varieties or cultivars with orange-colored blooms. Find them at your local nursery, or search online for specialty seeds.
Here are some of my favorite orange-blooming flowering plants:
- Western Wallflower
- Lantana
- Daylily
- ‘Queeny Lime Orange’ Zinnia
- California Poppy
- ‘Orange Wonder’ Snapdragon
- Calendula
- Marigold
My favorite on this list is the California poppy, as it’s prolific, easy-growing, and hard to kill. Perennial and reseeding in nature, this West Coast native plant is perfect for filling the orange curve of the rainbow.
Yellow
Yellow is the color of the sun! Perhaps the most important part of the rainbow, the yellow section, must be bright, shiny, and golden for the biggest impact in the yard. Sunflowers are iconic annuals for this section, though they tend to be tall and grow higher than the other sections.
To combat this, choose low-growing dwarf sunflowers that’ll stay at the same height as your other wildflowers. The ‘Teddy Bear’ dwarf sunflower is a special cultivar with fluffy petals, while ‘Elves Blend’ contains a mix of short, yellow varieties if you’d like different flower forms in the rainbow band.
These are some other yellow-blooming options for the sunshine-colored part of your rainbow:
These are some other yellow-blooming options for the sunshine-colored part of your rainbow:
- ‘Yellow Double’ Begonia
- ‘Hello Yellow’ Milkweed
- Black-Eyed Susan
- ‘Xanthos’ Cosmos
- ‘Phyllis’ African Marigold
- ‘Double Sunburst’ Coreopsis
- Calendula
- Western Buttercup
Yellow is incredibly common in the natural world. You’ll have no trouble finding your favorite flowers, whether you’re looking online at seed catalogs or in person at garden centers.
Green
The green band is the easiest one to plant of the seven colors, as most plants have green in their leaves! Opt for a bright green, leafy herb like parsley, dill, or savory. Some plants, like miner’s lettuce, have tiny flowers and green leaves that make them perfect for the task.
If you’d like to go above and beyond standard Pride plantings, choose green-flowering plants! These unique specimens bloom green petals above their leaves, adding charm to the site. Hellebores, coneflowers, and bells of Ireland are some of the many green-flowering options available for us home gardeners.
Blue
Blue is hard to find in the plant kingdom! You’ll find many plants that say they have blue blooms, though they turn out to be light purple or lavender. Don’t trust the labels, and do a little research before purchasing blue-flowering specimens.
Though rare, there are some options that’ll look good in mass plantings. The best choice, by far, is Lithodora ‘Grace Ward.’ It’s a low-growing ground cover that fills empty spaces with small, dark green leaves and small, bright blue blossoms.
Other options include plants in the Delphinium genus, as well as native plants like the Pacific hound’s tongue. Consult multiple resources to see if a flower is truly blue, as some photographers and storefronts edit their photos to look more blue than they actually are!
Indigo
Indigo, like blue, is tough to track down in the plant world. It’s a color halfway between blue and violet. Some indigo flowers are more blue, while others are more purple. The above photo of a liverleaf flower is an example of a blue-indigo-colored bloom.
You have some options here. You may choose to go for blue-indigo flowers, purple-indigo ones, or a blend of the two. False indigos are excellent specimens to start with. These perennials and annuals are in the genus Baptisia, and many of them are native to the U.S.! Other options include true indigos, irises, and petunias.
Violet
Violet flowers are easier to find than blue and indigo ones. Many breeders have created violet-hued varieties of our favorite garden specimens, creating a wealth of choices to select from. My favorite this year is the ‘Giant Purple’ zinnia, though my all-time favorite is purple-hued irises.
Two common violet irises are abundant on the West Coast: the Douglas iris and the tough-leaved iris. Both are superb perennial options for the violet band of the rainbow.
These are some other violet-blooming species that fit well in a Pride planting:
- Verbena
- Violet
- Pansy
- Lanceolate Self Heal
- Tall Spurflower
There are many more specimens to choose from, depending on where you live. Select the ones that’ll work well with the local climate. Opt for cool-loving types in areas with frost, and tropical ones in mild regions.
Use Straight Lines
Instead of curved bands, you can create a straight rainbow for your Pride garden! Simply layer the lines of color so that they’re vertical instead of curving. In each colorful band, plant the specimens you chose from the lists above. You can do the standard progression from red to violet, or mix up the plantings for a kaleidoscope effect.
A straight design is best in yards with formal, geometric shapes. Say you have a narrow strip of land on the side of your house, or your backyard is a perfect rectangle—the linear nature of the yard lends itself well to perpendicular lines of exquisite blooms.
Line Pathways
Formal gardens with straight lines are also perfect for pathway plantings. Wherever you have a walkway, line it with alternating shades for a rainbow-like effect. Every time you walk the path, you’ll have tons of blooms to look at and cherish.
There are a few ways to do this. You may plant single lines of color, with low-growing plants up front and taller ones in the back. The picture above is an example of this style. Or, you can alternate blocks of color in a single line along the pathway. This is best for small beds that lack space for multiple rows of wildflowers.
Add Color for Pollinators
Gardeners aren’t the only living beings that enjoy gardens! Each garden is a part of a larger ecosystem that includes local forests, your neighbors’ yards, and the hellstrips along the streets. No man is an island, and the same is true for gardens.
One way to help the ecosystem is to feed pollinators with native plants. Native bees need more help than European honeybees, and planting native plants is the best way to feed them. Opt for local species that work well in your area to fill your rainbow designs.
Many large plant genera have species across the country that grow in various states and ecoregions. Though I cultivate the western buttercup in Oregon, you’ll want to select the East Coast buttercup in the eastern states. This is one example; there are thousands of native species to choose from!
Create a Swirl
Linear designs have their place in formal gardens. However, organic shapes are fun to look at in Pride-themed rainbow gardens! I prefer wild, irregular designs over perfectly square and straight ones. A swirl, or spiral, creates a circular design that tucks in neatly amongst other formal structures.
Say you have a square plot or a wide lawn you want to convert into a wildflower garden—simply start the spiral in the middle of the plot, and plant in alternating rows in a circular fashion. Once you reach the edges of the plot, fill in the corners and borders with neutral colors or hardscaping materials.
A strip of white blooming wildflowers around the spiral forms a neutral, yet cheery frame. If you’d like to hardscape the swirl, use bricks, pavers, or metal edging to keep it in line.
Plant Colorful Containers
Who says you need a giant yard to celebrate Pride? Not me! I love to fill containers with bright blossoms for tucking into empty spaces. Sometimes, a garden’s dirt is too compact or soggy, or the beds are already full of crops. Other yards consist of a balcony, porch, or stoop without much in-ground room for cultivation.
In these yards, you may use containers as the sole design element. Plant single colors in each container and arrange them in a rainbow shape, or plant all colors of the rainbow inside a single, giant pot. The possibilities are endless!
Mono-color Beds
If you have a large yard full of empty raised beds, you have the perfect setup for mono-color beds. Simply choose a color, find a suitable plant, and fill the bed with a single species. Alternate each bed so that the first one has red blooms, the second orange ones, and so on until you reach violet.
En masse, mono-color beds make an impressive statement. You’ll need at least seven to have space for all the colors. If you only have two or three, divide the beds into two equal sections and fill each section with a different hue of the rainbow.
You can even create a single mono-color bed! Divide it into seven portions, then fill each portion with a different rainbow color for a unique Pride garden.
