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| Photo Credit: Clayton Landscaping, Gastonia, NC |
| I usually start my swatch boards by selecting the large, more permanent plants. |
Designing your great outdoor living space can be more mind-boggling than picking the perfect wallpaper. (The good Lord made sure there were more ornamental plants available than wallpaper patterns.) And once you think you’ve seen it all, someone introduces something new and more fabulous than the plant before it!
Trying to visualize how it’ll all work together in your yard can make you feel a bit frazzled. How can you make all your plants’ colors, sizes, textures and bloom cycles flow throughout your landscape when it’s difficult to visualize how things will actually look in your garden in the first place? After all, an actual garden plan is nothing more than empty circles on white paper, and imagining its future reality can be daunting (to say the least). Well, worry no more! There’s an easy way to help you visualize and achieve a great garden on your own – just borrow my professional secret trick for planning a beautiful yard…which I borrowed from a professional trick used in interior design. Interior decorators would be lost without their swatch boards. The samples of fabrics, flooring, paint and accessories they arrange on a card is what they traditionally use to visualize a client’s finished room. And you, the “exterior decorator,” can borrow this swatch board technique to help visualize your outdoor living space. All you need is a computer with Internet access (which you appear to have already) and a desktop publishing program. You don’t need anything fancy – just the ability to randomly arrange plant photos, crop or resize them, and label them (so you don’t get your plant picks mixed up).
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