Go from
this...
To this...
But first, a cautionary
tale. Avoid My 3 Mistakes
One year after hastily
planting upwards of 50 shrubs, trees and assorted leafy green whatnots in the barren yard of the house we
just bought, I was uprooting 25% of them and transplanting them elsewhere. The second year, another 25%
were moved. The third year, well, you guessed it. And you know what? Transplanting got old after just the first
few fights with buried root balls. And after year 3, when some of the bushes had grown to the size of Honda
Fits, the job had become back-breaking. All of which leads to the first thing I should have
done in landscaping...
1) Have a plan.
I figured, nature doesn’t have
a plan. Why do I need one? Well, it turns out nature does have a plan--survival of the fittest. The
strong overtake the weak. And the concept of “aesthetically pleasing” is a concept unknown to nature. We
homeowners, on the other hand, want all of our plants to survive and thrive–strong and weak, hand in hand
singing Kumbaya as the focal-point birch clump sways us gently on hammocks, our lips stained with Kool-Aid. And
when we open our eyes from that August nap, we want to see rolling, flowing waves of plant life and envious
neighbors. It’s not going to happen without a plan.
In planning landscape, start
with a paper and pencil sketch. Outline your lot, home and driveway, and begin doodling some ideas. Sketch out
flowerbeds–do you want curved, flowing boundaries or crisp, formal lines and angles to the beds? Freestanding
clusters of shrubs, grasses and flowers–where? And trees–evergreen or deciduous, standing alone or clustered or
incorporated into a bed? Need some ideas? Need to see how others have made planning landscape work for
them?
Take a drive and pick out yards
that you find especially well landscaped–take notes or even pictures. Hint: leave the telephoto lens at home to
avoid neighbors calling 911. Better yet, ask permission of the homeowner first. You’ll likely get permission, a
gleaming smile, and a detailed dissertation of each plant. Find more ideas in books and magazines. Since my
early fiasco, I’ve taken to clipping photos from magazines and have amassed a collection of self-help
landscaping books from the likes of Home Depot and Lowes and Amazon.com, providing not only relevant photographs
and in-depth planning guides, but critical help in identifying individual plants for your climate zone and
preferred level of maintenance. Of these,
Step-by-Step Landscaping (Step-By-Step) by Better Homes
and Gardens is quite good. 408 pages of all new material, this guide has over 700 photographs and 100 complete
step-by-step projects ranging from handling slopes to building decks and patios. Plus a huge plant
encyclopedia with 95 photos.
If software is more your thing, look
into
Better Homes and Gardens Landscaping and Deck Designer 8.0 [Newest Version]. This is a
powerful software package from the trusted folks at Better Homes and Gardens that puts every imaginable
tool at your fingertips for designing outdoor projects from landscaping to decks and patios, sprinkler
systems, water features, etc. You can import your own photos, choose and arrange plants from a
catalog of over 3500, and estimate project costs. This is great stuff for
experimenting with design ideas--see what a single or multi-level deck would look like coming off your back
door; see what a brick or stone patio would look like before you break your back; build fencing and
arrange outdoor furniture in 3D graphics.
But I digress. In sum, have a
plan, or have a shovel in your hand for the next five years.
2) Don’t crowd those new plants.
Every container plant from your
favorite nursery or garden center will have attached a little plastic tag identifying the plant and offering
planting suggestions. Treat those suggestions as gold. Especially the spacing suggestions. To wit, the three
Blue Pfitzer junipers purchased by yours truly and spaced two feet apart in a front flower bed when the tags
said to space them 5-6 feet apart. My thinking was: but they’re so tiny. And they looked ridiculously tiny in that big old empty flower bed. So I
pushed them together and two years later I was digging up the middle one and planting it further out and two
years after that I was digging up all three because they had
collectively outgrown the flower bed. I threw’em in the ground along the back fence and now they’re trying to
push the fence down. No offense to you Blue Pfitzer propagators, but your junipers are brutal.
I wish I
could say that the junipers were the only plants on which I ignored the spacing requirements. Sadly, in my zeal
to fill up a yard I ignored tags left and right. Which accounts for 75% of the subsequent transplanting that has
taken place to date. So here are some words to the wise: Plants grow. Some plants grow mightily. So space plants
accordingly from the start.
For good tips on planting, as
well as a trusted source of hard-to-find container plants suited for your climate zone and shipped worry-free to
your door, try Nature Hills
Nursery, Inc. Punch in your zip code (upper right hand corner) to find your planting zone, then browse
or use their "Plant Finder" (left margin) to focus in on your needs.
3) Planning Landscape - Remember, you still gotta mow.
Unless your plan calls for a
bush or flower on every square foot of your lot, remember that the remaining lawn needs maintaining. One of the
early mistakes I made was not allowing for ease of mowing. I positioned low-hanging trees in the middle of the
yard, created a few too many freestanding clumps of this and that, and fashioned flower beds that made following
along with a mower especially difficult. Soft green grass is a lovely thing and I’m a big fan. But remember when
planning landscape, you’ll be mowing that grass every week. And the older you get the less amused you’ll be
while doing the limbo under low tree branches.
© 2008 David Alan Carter / All
Rights Reserved
David Alan Carter is a homeowner, budding landscaper and
freelance writer who lives each of his articles–and has the aching back
and purple thumb to prove it.
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