Commercial Seasonal Color Programs

Put colour where people stop

Seasonal colour is the most expensive planting per square foot on a commercial property, by a wide margin, and it is often spread too thin to register.

The rule that makes it pay is concentration. A small number of well planted beds at the points where people stop, at the entrance, at the leasing office, at a main door, delivers more than the same budget scattered across a large site.

Colour at forty miles an hour is invisible. Colour where somebody waits for a door is looked at closely.

The other consideration is what it says. Fresh, well maintained colour at an entrance reads as a property somebody is actively looking after, which is a signal worth more than the flowers.

Colour at forty miles an hour is invisible. Colour where somebody waits for a door is looked at closely.

How many rotations, and when

Most commercial properties here run two or three colour rotations a year, and the timing follows the climate rather than the calendar elsewhere.

A cool season planting goes in around October and holds through the winter and into spring, which is a long display in this climate. A warm season planting goes in around April or May.

Some properties add a third rotation for a specific period, usually late summer, when the cool season material has finished and the warm season planting is tiring.

Two well timed rotations beat three rushed ones. The most common mistake is changing out too late, so a bed sits looking exhausted for a month before the replacement goes in.

Getting a full display out of a rotation

Annual colour is a short lived, high input planting, and small details decide whether a rotation looks good for six weeks or five months.

Bed preparation matters more than for anything else on the property. These beds are replanted repeatedly, which depletes and compacts them. Refreshing soil and organic matter at each rotation is not optional if the display is expected to perform.

Water is the second. Annuals in a bed at an entrance, often in reflected heat, dry faster than anything else on the site and usually sit on a zone designed for shrubs.

Deadheading is the third, and it is the item most often left out of the maintenance scope. Many annuals stop producing once they set seed. On a commercial schedule that means a display that peaks and then quietly stops.