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Landscape Design

Landscape Design: Foundation Planting?

August 16, 2022

Every house—even your townhouse or condo—has a foundation! Landscapers traditionally plant shrubs, trees, and sometimes annual and perennial plants in front of the foundation, most obviously for “curb appeal.” Foundation plantings can serve many other purposes, such as moderating environmental conditions by reducing indoor temperatures through shade or providing a windbreak. What is yours doing?

Overgrown foundation plants

Take an honest look at your foundation planting

  • Are the plantings looking good?
    • Many established foundation plantings are overgrown:
      • Are trees or shrubs too close to the house?
      • Are views from windows and doors obstructed?
    • Other plantings are failing! Are any plants struggling to survive or are already dead?
      • If one or more shrubs or trees hasn’t prospered, there may be obvious gaps in the existing landscape.
      • If a design that is meant to mirror or repeat hasn’t done so, the planting may look lopsided!
    • What do you want your planting to do for you?
      • Does your foundation planting harmonize with your home and your lifestyle?
        • Do your plant choices complement the home’s building materials, color palette, size, and architectural style?
        • Consider what maintenance your planting needs–If you won’t have time to prune fast-growing or very formal shrub plantings, weed extensive flower beds, or edge the interface between foundation planting and lawn, consider lower maintenance choices.
      • Are there any other benefits different foundation plants could add in providing four-season interest, privacy, shade, or enhancing views from inside the home?
Before…
After!

Changing landscape traditions give you new ways to update your foundation planting

  • If you are thinking about reducing or replacing your lawn, consider integrating your foundation area into your new landscape design.
  • Using native plants in your landscape is another trend—and one recommended way to replace your lawn! Even if you keep your lawn, including natives in your foundation planting can help attract birds and pollinators to your yard.
Edible foundation plantings

Edible landscaping is becoming more popular, too. Are there opportunities to incorporate edibles into your foundation planting?

    • In addition to fruiting trees or shrubs, there are many attractive herb and vegetables that can double as ornamentals.
    • Don’t plant edibles in contaminated soils or chemically treated areas—termite treatments are often applied around foundations—check to ensure the treatments used are safe for edibles.

If you are installing a new foundation planting or revamping an existing one, examine the planting beds as well as your plant choices! Poor soils, construction debris, and drainage issues may all affect your success. See the links below on designing and planting your foundation beds. Do a soil test!

Garden inspiration is a year-round opportunity. Enjoy!

Article written by Debbie Green, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer

For more information:

Landscape design: https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/extension-gardener-handbook/19-landscape-design#section_heading_6158

Designing and planting your foundation beds: https://lsuagcenter.com/articles/page1640179592192

Using native plants in foundation plantings around townhomes and single-family homes:
https://extension.umd.edu/resource/landscape-designs-native-plants

 

 

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Categories General Gardening, Landscape Design Tags Foundation planting, landscape planning, native plants

A Garden Is Living Art in Nature

May 1, 2022

Occasionally I ask myself, “Why do I garden?”  It takes work, can be expensive, things die.  But to answer my question: “I feel alive in the beauty of my garden.”  The garden, for me, is like living within an artist’s painting.  As a career, my mediocre talent would have rendered me a fair but struggling artist.  But in the garden, I get to create my artistic voice—a composition filled with shape, color, texture, and mood.

Gardening inspiration varies by gardener
Gardening holds a variety of interests for different people.  Some are fascinated by unusual plant varieties; others are horticultural enthusiasts who seek scientific knowledge of plants; some approach gardening as a contribution to environmental health; others maintain a garden to improve the appearance of their home and play space.  Mine happens to be simply an artistic experiment in visual appeal.

For the most part, I’m happy with the landscape I’ve created over the years—except this one, small, oblong, garden space near the driveway.  I’ve tried so many different things:  ornamental grasses, roses, daisies, ajuga, and marigolds.  Who can’t grow marigolds?  I’ve had the soil tested and know the dirt is really good.  Moisture levels and drainage are fine.  I’ve even tracked an entire year of sun and shade patterns.  So, what’s wrong?  The area is just dull, uninteresting, and unappealing.  It needs to be replanted.  And I’ve decided to tackle it like an artist preparing to paint a masterpiece.

Creating a plan
Many techniques for creating a good painting and a pleasing landscape are actually quite similar.  Each requires thinking about composition, focal point, color choice, and movement or directional lines.

Small garden plot of mixed perennials and shrubs
Newly planted mixed perennial bed

Artists will often begin by creating a rendering of the envisioned painting.  Likewise, I started this replanting project by creating a plan.  I measured the area (8 feet by 16 feet) and sketched a rough outline.  I showed both the straight and curved edges of the oblong, and I highlighted the portion that receives full afternoon sun in summer.  I noted the most important existing feature—a ‘Bloodgood’ Japanese maple tree—and the least attractive feature—a telephone utility box.  Then I noted conifers in my neighbor’s yard that would become the background for my “painting”—Hinoki false cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa) and a large cedar tree.  These elements defined the starting point of my composition.

Composition for a painting and for the landscape involves shapes, sizes, groups, and patterns.  It involves how these masses are arranged relative to each other and how they direct the eye along curves, lines, or see-through spaces.  Every composition needs a focal point and mine will be the Japanese maple.  The tree is perfectly situated off-center in the oblong, its branching structure frames a distant azalea bed, and its burgundy-red leaves define my color palate.  Everything else in the area will become supporting elements to this primary focal point.

The utility box needs camouflage.  The area in front of the conifers needs to be softened and brightened.  The sun-baked, curved edge at one end of the planting bed requires a different treatment than the shady area beneath the maple tree.  And the viewer’s eye must travel the length of the planting bed, pausing at secondary points of interest, before arriving at the primary focal point.  An artist can create these effects using objects of different shapes and sizes, color and light, and the angle or direction of brush strokes.  My design challenge is similar.  But instead of using paint and brush strokes, I must choose plants that create the visual effect I want and that tolerate the growing conditions of my space.

Selecting the elements of my living art
I decided on a grouping of Otto Luyken laurels and hydrangeas to transition from the conifer background to the planting bed, to introduce a different leaf texture, and to brighten the area with white and pink blossoms.  The hydrangeas will grow to partially obscure the utility box, as will a grouping of penstemons, or beardtongue.  The burgundy foliage of the penstemons replicates the color of the Japanese maple and helps the eye skip from the front of the bed to the focal point.

I heightened the interest under the maple tree by grouping hostas, heuchera, and Japanese forest grass.  The white and lime-green leaves of the hostas and forest grass will brighten the shady area and contrast nicely with the burgundy heuchera foliage.  A row of yellow-blooming coreopsis follows the curve of the lower edge of the bed and directs the eye toward the maple tree.  The coreopsis is underplanted with Cerastium tomentosum ‘Snow in Summer’ for its white flowers and silvery, fine-textured foliage.  A final nod to contrasting textures and repeating colors comes from a grouping of red and yellow day lilies.  Their spiky leaves and tall flower stalks will shoot up between the hydrangeas and the coreopsis to offer another element of interest in the garden.

Cerastium tomentosum 'Snow in Summer'_Jim Janke_CC BY 4.0
Cerastium tomentosum ‘Snow in Summer’
Coreopsis 'Jethro Tull'. Commonly called tickseed.
Coreopsis ‘Jethro Tull’
Penstemon digitalis 'Blackbeard'. Commonly called beardtongue.
Penstemon digitalis ‘Blackbeard’
Hydrangea macrophylla 'Mini Penny'
Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Mini Penny’
Japanese forest grass. Hakonechloa macra_Lucy Bradley_CCO
Japanese forest grass
Heuchera 'Palace Purple'_Kathleen Moore_CC BY 2.0. Commonly called coral bells.
Heuchera ‘Palace Purple’
Hosta 'Mediovariegata'
Hosta ‘Mediovariegata’

As I muse about my garden, I recognize that my enthusiasm comes from the artistic endeavor of design and that my joy comes from seeing the final composition.  I garden to create spaces that convey a visual message—some quiet and tranquil, some exuberant and colorful, some invitations to explore, and some reflecting memories of people and places.  My garden is my canvas—my contribution to art through nature.

Article written by Beth Leonard, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer.

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Categories General Gardening, Landscape Design Tags landscape design, soil-full musings

Wildflowers Part IV: Using Wildflowers in Your Garden

March 18, 2019

Including wildflowers in the home garden adds beauty, brings surprise, attracts pollinators, and creates a natural looking, informal landscape. If you select a location to match their natural growing conditions— sun/shade, wet/dry, open area/woodland, and elevation—wildflowers easily co-exist with typical garden plantings and require little maintenance.

Wildflower Garden

Where to get wildflowers
Start wildflowers from purchased seeds, or divisions, stem or root cuttings from friends. It is often illegal to dig wildflowers from the wild because of concerns about depleting natural populations! Purchase plants only from reputable nurseries that do not collect stock from the wild and label their plants “100% nursery propagated.”

Choosing wildflowers for your garden
Some wildflowers are fairly easy to establish. These include showy perennials such as:

Tickseed Sunflower (Coreopsis)

 

Coral Bells (Heuchera)
Dwarf Crested Iris (Iris cristada)
Bee Balm (Monarda)
Wild Blue Phlox (Phlox divaricata)

Many of these are available at local and mail-order nurseries, but not all species will be native to our area and many will be hybridized, or cultivars selected because they are unusual or showier.

If you enjoy including self-seeding plants in your garden, some shorter-lived Coreopsis and Rudbeckia species, as well as columbine (Aquilegia canadensis), blazing star (Liatris spicate), cardinal flowers (Lobelia cardinalis), and bird’s foot violet (Viola pedata) will persist and often spread in your garden through reseeding.

Low-growing wildflowers can make attractive groundcovers, too. Partridgeberry (Mitchella repens) has tiny white flowers followed by bright red berries that stand out against evergreen leaves.

Partridge Berry (Mitchella repens)

Other wildflowers, like lady slipper orchids, are much more difficult to propagate and/or transplant and are best admired in their natural habitats!

Article written by Beth Leonard, Extension Master GardenerSM Volunteer.

Learn more

Mellichamp, Larry (2014). Native Plants of the Southeast: A Comprehensive Guide to the Best 460 Species for the Garden. Timber Press.

 Search the Buncombe County Extension Master Gardener website for these wildflowers highlighted in earlier blogs:

  • Bee balm
  • Butterfly weed
  • Columbine
  • Coreopsis
  • Dwarf crested iris
  • Echinacea
  • Goldenrod
  • Joe Pye weed
  • Rudbeckia
  • Solomon’s seal

If you’re interested in encouraging wildlife in your garden: https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/landscaping-for-wildlife-with-native-plants

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Categories Landscape Design, Wildflowers Tags bee balm, Coral Bells, coreopsis, dwarf crested iris, heuchera, Monarda, native plants, Phlox, Tickseed sunflower, Wildlflowers

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