What’s a garden without the added texture, color and beauty of trees and shrubs? But before you dig, it’s a good idea to plan out your design. And the best way to do that is to get the basics of your existing garden down.
Trees and shrubs work together to add color, layers and texture to any garden.
Photo Credit: ©2002 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Think about all kinds of texture in your yard when selecting your trees and shrubs. This madrone sheds its bark each year (but keeps its leaves).
Photo Credit: ©2002 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Good garden design is in the details. Be sure to include a relaxing place to sit and enjoy your space, and give yourself durable pathways to get around that match the rest of your garden.
Photo Credit: ©2002 Dolezal Publishing/John M. Rickard
Perhaps you just want to enhance what you’ve already got growing in your yard, adding height, interest or privacy. Maybe you’ve moved into a newly built home and you’re starting your landscape from scratch. Either way, take stock of what you have – and measure everything carefully – so you can keep your design in scale with your home and its surroundings.
Think of your landscape as a canvas for a 3-D painting. Use the basic outline of your garden as your sketchpad. With that in place, you can experiment with different designs until you find the one that best suits you and your needs.
As you get started, remember that unity and harmony are at the heart any good design. All the elements in your landscape (special features, fences, patios, plants, structures and walkways) should work together to create your overall style. Examine the elements you already have and enhance them with complementary plants and materials. For example, suitable plantings for a Southwestern-style home could include rugged pines, yuccas and other plants unique to that area of the country, while lilacs and sweet viburnum would go wonderfully with a charming Victorian bungalow.
You can achieve similar unifying effects with nonplant materials, too. For example, brick homes can be complemented with brick walkways, patios or bed edgings that visually tie everything together.
Another important design element is scale – or the size relationship between objects. The size of your plantings should be compatible with the scale of your house. A tree like dogwood, which is of medium height and has an open habit, is a good choice for the corner of a small house. Taller trees and denser shrubs balance and anchor larger homes set in more expansive surroundings.
Finally, as you plan your garden, think of plants in terms of their shape. Shrubs can be columnar, rounded, spiky, mounding or fastigiated (tall and narrowing toward the top). Trees are often classified as columnar, pendulous, pyramidal, round-crowned, vase-shaped or weeping. Let these shapes become mental templates. Use them to help determine what plants would complement your house. You may choose a tall, pyramidal tree to soften a corner, a mass of mounding shrubs under the front windows and a weeping tree as an accent.
Don’t forget to match the style of your home with your style of garden. Formal homes are complemented by formal, symmetrical garden designs, while rustic homes are enhanced by looser, more naturalistic garden designs. Repeat the garden style’s curves or straight lines and right angles throughout your plan to unify the entire area.
As a final little tip, add an element of mystery to your garden when you can by keeping one or two items out of easy view. A curving path might lead to a garden bench tucked behind a mass of hydrangeas – a miniature retreat that’s all the more pleasant because it’s hidden. In a small setting, consider hanging a set of wind chimes around a corner. Hearing the chimes’ pleasant harmonies without seeing the source of the sound intrigues visitors and magically makes your space seem larger than it really is.
Before you begin the actual design process, you’ll need to get out into your yard and take some careful measurements of your space. Then you’ll need to transfer those numbers to graph paper (or a design software program on your computer).
You may also find it useful to take pictures of your yard from various points of view (from the street, back door and driveway, for example), enlarge the pictures on a photocopier or scan them into a computer. This way you can draw on the photocopies with colored pencils (or drop in a graphic of a desired plant), and test different planting schemes. It’s a rather simple way “to see” exactly what a rounded shrub may look like instead of a columnar selection without taking dirt to shovel or just imagining it on paper.
Once you’ve got the measurements down (and photos in hand), you can begin to sketch out your plan, bringing together all you know about your site and goals. To do it the old-fashioned paper-and-pencil way, gather your materials and take the steps shown in the following pictures and described in their captions. Before long, you’ll really be “digging” your new garden space.
