I designed gardens this years and also installed a few. I’ve recently had some thoughts about the designs and garden designs in general. I read this post about how garden designs aren’t great. I have to disagree a bit: garden design are tremendously useful. But there should be some disclaimers about them as well.

• Designing a garden is never quite done because the garden is living. Plants will need to be re-arranged, thinned, added to, moved, and even dug out and thrown away. No garden is ever really completed.
• Every plant reacts differently to a different environment, and every garden has its own unique environment. I can get what I think is a perfect plant arrangement on paper, and it might be in certain situations. But  it could turn out that a certain plant or plant combination just doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean the design is wrong: it simply needs to be modified for the specific situation.
• Starting out with a design (that will most likely be modified) will mean there is somewhere to start, something to work towards, and something to modify. It’s better than no design at all. Garden designs turn gardening into an enjoyable, manageable task where everything is eventually able to come together and create a unified appearance.
• Designing is essential to get a good backbone to the garden. The plant material will be adjusted over time as it grows (or fails to grow), but basic plant arrangement, lines, borders  and the structure of it all can be defined by an initial garden design and won’t change too much.
• Good gardens only come about with good maintenance. Even a low maintenance design needs a watchful eye.

I’m putting this out there, but I’m also moving across the country. Any garden I’ve designed, or you would like me to design, comes with a free yearly consultation by me to see how it is coming along and offer suggestions on continued development. All garden designs really are a first draft, one that will need to be modified over the years.

This is a tip for everyone who wants to make their landscape look better but don’t have the time or money to do a lot: add mulch. Here is one situation where I used this tactic.

The front of this condo complex could no longer be irrigated due to problems with the irrigation system. The grass was dying, although most of the trees in the strip were doing fine. With little in the budget, the solution was to simply kill off any remaining grass and add mulch. The total cost of the project was $500, far less than re-landscaping the area.

The great thing about mulching is it allows for future changes and the gradual addition of plants. The most common solution I see here for cheap landscaping is lawn. Seeding a lawn can be dirt cheap. In the long run, however, the landscape looks boring, the lawn eats up plenty of maintenance time, chemicals and water, and can end up costing quite a bit if you start calculating in all the cost of materials you stick on it.  I think laying out proper planting beds and simply mulching is a much better short term fix and it leads to a better long term solution.

I did a garden design for another client who lacked the several thousand dollars to put it in. The plan turned into redesigning the beds, irrigation system and going ahead with the lawn, but waiting on the other large area of mixed planting. That area will be put in gradually. By mulching the area at the beginning of the project it still looks nice and it will be easy to add the variety of shrubs and perennials over the next few years.

Plants are wonderful, but they can often be fairly expensive. Don’t just turn the landscape over to cheap lawn or leave ugly dirt and weed showing: maintain the areas you want for mixed planting beds, mulch them, and than add plants as budget and times allows.

Maintenance on a mulch-only area is simple: hand pull or spray out the weeds. If the mulch is deep enough, there won’t be very many. Wood/bark chips and rocks/gravel are the most common types of mulch and both work fine. Pick whichever look you like best and fits with long term goal of the landscape. Buying mulch in bags gets expensive quickly. Bulk mulch is far cheaper, and is often worth the cost of delivery if you don’t have a truck. (You often need more mulch than you think. For instance, a rear border of about 5 feet deep in a small yard will need around 5 cubic yards of mulch, or 5 truckloads. There’s plenty of good calculators out there to figure out how much mulch you actually need…but basically it’s just a matter of geometry.) Mulch should be put on to a depth of two inches. It will also need to be replenished occasionally ( every 1-5 years for organic mulch/bark chips).

Mulch has the benefits of keeping down weeds; maintaining even soil moisture; decreasing soil temperature; preventing compaction, soil splashing and soil crusting; and adding organic matter into the soil (if you use an organic mulch).  Mulch is a great solution to tons of landscaping problems. Use it.

So lately I’ll I’ve been doing in the garden is weeding and picking tomatoes and some other veggies. Lots of tomatoes. But you really can’t have too much. I have been eating large amounts of BLT’s too. They are delicious. I harvested a few leeks (my trial crop for the year, and they turned out better than a bunch of other stuff) and made a leek and potato soup, which was yummy.

Today I went and bought a whole bunch of plants for a landscape project. I would highly encourage people to make planting plans. I see so many gardens planted willy-nilly. But with a good planting plan you know exactly what and how many plants to buy, and make sure you have plants blooming/looking good the entire season. You can also avoid doing things like planting azaleas in Utah (very stupid and any good nursery won’t carry them), buying plants with nowhere to put them, or putting a plant in the wrong place.

Not saying a planting plan is set in stone. I never spec out exact varieties, preferring to finalize those when I buy them. Sometimes you have to substitute out something because you can’t find it. And there is always improvements to make after it’s all planted up, maybe some plants are struggling in a certain spot, or you don’t like the way a certain perennial looks. An occasional spur-of the moment purchase is fine too. (I have chocolate flowers to plant. No idea where yet, but I bought them for 1.5o a piece at a year-end garden center sale. They are awesome plants so very worth it.)

Planting plans aren’t hard to make with a decent plant encyclopedia. I made a bunch of plant lists that I use with my favorite and common plants, and I’ve posted them here.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is I had lots of fun buying lots of plants and a landscape design made that happen.

On of my relative’s house is a very plain manufactured home:

I gave them a landscape design for a present and recently finished the front planting bed. I wanted to get rid of the look of the manufactured home, and add lots more plants. I went with plants that mirrored the blue-grey and maroon in the house color, focusing primarily on foliage color. There are actually lots of interesting blue-grey/purple-leafed plants out there, so it was a fun design to do. The following plan could be planted more heavily, but I decided it was  good enough start.

I also decided to experiment with a digital makeover. I saw some on another garden blog and wanted to give it a go. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be, and the results are dramatic. I think people are much more likly to follow a landscape plan when they can see it as it would turn out. Overhead plans are functional, but don’t have the wow factor. Here’s the generated image of the matured landscape:

I’m pleased with how it turned out and have shared it a lot. It is the first of a lot more mock-ups follow: I enjoy doing it and it helped my planting plan as well.