Tag: Landscape

  • Landscaping ideas for new home owners

    Landscaping ideas for new home owners

    Your First Garden, a new book by Judith Adam

    Consider this: You’ve just made one of the most important and most expensive investments of your life — you’ve bought a brand-new house with an empty garden. What’s next? As a new homeowner, you want to feel confident that you’ve made a smart decision. While it may be a temptation to imagine that the exterior footage is not part of the house’s purchase value, the reality is, you’ve paid for every square foot of property. Making plans and decisions about landscaping that property will ratify your purchase and ensure that you take full advantage of all the assets you’ve acquired. Failing to make landscape plans, on the other hand, is a lot like writing off that third bedroom or an unfinished basement — ignoring space that initially seems useless or confusing.

    Landscaping plans help you enjoy your home

    Landscaping “seals the deal” by providing your new house with context, making it look appropriate in the landscape — and that in turn reflects on the smartness of the purchase and the value for money paid. It also presents a full picture of the home’s potential, in both the near and distant future. The purpose of home landscaping is to provide an intelligent, useful and attractive setting for your home. Pride of ownership begins on day one, and regardless of how much time you plan to invest in the house itself, you’ll want it to look terrific from the get-go and will work toward that for the first couple of years. It’s all about figuring out how to make the exterior garden work with your home and planning the outdoor space so that it will be useful and functional for specific purposes — providing access to entrances, paths for getting around, and areas for dining and relaxation, entertainment, sports activities, and so forth.

    The truth is, much of the foundation of good landscape planning is simply rational thinking: learning how to divide space, how to determine essential and practical uses and how to make changes and choices in all the areas of your property, from the front lawn and entrance to the private spaces in the backyard and the areas along the driveway and sides of the house. Increasing your property’s beauty is an important goal of a landscape plan, but equally important is making sure that all the features of your lot function as they should. For example, water must drain away from the house, the entrance walkway needs to be wider than a one-person bachelor path, and seating areas should be screened for privacy.

    Design a landscape to meet your needs

    Every property has its challenges, and landscape planning always starts with an objective assessment of the site, creating a list of its assets and debits, noticing what features are inadequate or unattractive. Are slopes too steep to walk on safely? Is there a secure space for garbage cans and an air conditioner unit? Are the pathways level and firm?

    Learning to evaluate the options is just as important as getting the job done well. Then you have to balance those needs against a realistic projection of how you would like to use the space and how much money you’re willing to invest to make that happen. Resolving what you have with what you want is a giant leap toward designing a landscape to meet your needs. That said, when a new house is built in a new subdivision or in an established neighbourhood, there’s a good chance that it will lack even the most rudimentary landscaping features such as trees and shrubs. The lawn may be new sod that has been laid over a minimal layer of topsoil, or there may be no sod at all. You have a clean site to work with — and a clear invitation to build from the ground up.

    Plant selection in your first garden

    It’s often the case that gardening careers begin in small ways, with the planting of a few flowers or vegetables just outside the back door. Plants of every kind are inevitably the most prominent features in your garden, and they are also the most complex and diverse. As living components of the landscape, their value is more than aesthetic — they create a healthy and rewarding context for your outdoor activities. That’s why understanding their cultural needs — soil quality, moisture and light — is an important key to plant selection and a crucial step toward successful landscape planning.

    A good start is to understand the basics of plant care. There are a selection of plant lists that will suit a range of sites and circumstances. As the garden grows, small gestures soon lead to larger efforts and increasing rewards. Landscape planning is the logical extension of gardening, and you’re probably doing it in your mind already. Most imagined improvements and attempted changes reflect your interest in developing the garden landscape.

    Buy the book

    Your First Garden: A Landscape Primer for New Home Owners is published by Firefly Books.

    Order Your First Garden book from ChaptersIndigo.ca

    Order Your First Garden book from Amazon.ca

    Order Your First Garden book from BookShop.org (only in U.S.; supports independent book sellers)

  • Garden design ideas for all season blooms

    Garden design ideas for all season blooms

    What do gardeners want? The simple answer is to see beautiful blooms every day of the growing season. What we’re more likely to see are a few bursts of colourful blossoms interspersed with increasingly long periods of green leaves. This scenario is the result of planting only what interests us most (or what recently seduced us at the garden centre), instead of following a design plan that brings consistent bloom from spring through summer and into autumn. Now, Garden Making is providing garden design ideas for all season blooms by creating a perennial bed with non-stop flowers from spring right through to fall. We list the plants that will feature each season and provide a diagram for the planting plan.

    Length of bloom for perennials

    For many years, my garden produced an impressive display of spring bulbs and early-flowering shrubs like forsythia and lilac, followed by flushes of bloom from peonies and roses. A few hydrangeas and daylilies came on in midsummer, but then there was a long slide into green gaps lasting for several weeks, until the fall leaf colours appeared in trees and shrubs. Basically, the garden offered impressive floral displays for a few brief weeks, interspersed with periods of no flowers at all. The bloom sequences were unreliable, and I couldn’t expect to see the garden in bloom for the full growing season. This was disappointing and, at the very least, limited my opportunities for garden parties.

    Looking beyond the seductive categories of lilacs, roses, peonies and irises to less familiar families like penstemons, yarrows, monkshood and snakeroots led to expanded periods of bloom in my large perennial bed, and the beginning of a constant bloom strategy. Using a calendar to pinpoint the green weeks with no visible flowers, I filled in the gaps with plants scheduled to bloom in these empty periods. After two growing seasons, there were increasingly extended periods of blossom. Learning about perennials beyond my initial list of favourites, and then planning and planting for timed flower sequences through three seasons brought me closer to the goal of a garden in bloom every day from spring through autumn.

    Informed selection in plants for your border and practical maintenance considerations go a long way toward keeping a garden in bloom. The average length of bloom for perennials is three weeks, but some, like summer phlox, stonecrops, catmint and columbines, will bloom for six to eight weeks, providing convenient overlaps from one season to the next. Others, such as several dwarf daylilies, will even be in generous flower from late spring through frost. Although clumps of perennials acquire drought hardiness as they mature, their ability to produce flowers for extended periods is greatly enhanced by fertilizing in spring, watering weekly and deadheading spent blooms.

    Number of plants to use

    With a time sequence design in hand and a willingness to acquire multiples of new plants (and really, how hard is that?), the next decision is how many plants are required to fill in the weeks when no flowers are on display. This is a matter of perception: you may be satisfied with fewer, while others may need more to feel that the bed is in bloom every week of the growing season. Whether you’re cautiously conservative or extravagantly enthusiastic, it’s possible to make a garden bed that will continuously bloom for three seasons.

    The perception of fullness is based less on the number of plants in bloom and more on the colour and texture contrasts among the plants that are in flower at the same time — for example, the variegated silver-and-green leaves of ‘Excalibur’ lungwort contrasted with the purple foliage of Wine and Roses weigela. Also, if a particular plant, like the lungwort, is known to make a robust spring display, it would be smart to capitalize its energy and put three together for a big burst of colourful flowers and foliage, and a second group of the same plant at the other end of the bed. The repetition of such a high-performance plant adds eye-catching fullness to the bed, and is the keystone plant to combine with at least two other perennials that bloom at the same time. Three different plant varieties placed strategically would produce a sense of fullness even with fewer specimens — and the bed would be in bloom.

    To my eye, three different plants blooming together is the minimum, and you might wish to expand to five or six selections that all bloom at the same time. As discussed, some of those could be high performers, and therefore good candidates for repetition, to be used in a couple of locations. Your justifiable greed for plants will most certainly be rewarded with an increased sequence of bloom and fewer weeks of just green.

    Year-round interest

    Having come this far with making a shopping list and a planting scheme to fill in green periods, it bears mentioning that woody plants are an asset in the perennial bed, providing structure and their own blooming sequence in the master plan. Shrubs will contribute their flowers, and may have purple or variegated foliage. Trees and conifers bred for narrow stature can contribute flowers and ornamental fruit, as well as winter interest. When selecting woody plants for a perennial bed, just be sure their width at maturity won’t crowd out other valuable specimens.

    The planting plan and plant list

    The garden bed design in this plan is intended to show perennial plants transitioning in and out of bloom through three seasons. The plan is structured with six perennials and a woody specimen for each season (you could use fewer, still with good results). Factoring in additional overlapping bloom from high-performance plants, it’s going to be a year of abundant flowers and more than one garden party.

    GardenMaking_3-season-planting-planDownload

Advertisements
Clicky