Planned Planting – Low Tech Solution for Harmonious Landscape

Reading, studying and planning your garden and landscape activities are good ways of occupying oneself during the month February for the Northern gardener. The average home gardener devotes far too little attention to planning, that is, seriously thought out and studied arrangements.

Too much planning is of the spur-of-the-moment type given just before seeds are sown or plants set out. This seldom proves satisfactory and undoubtedly accounts for the fact that there is much more good horticulture practiced than good garden art. Gardens and plantings of any sort should be studied on paper where various arrangements can be worked out without involving any actual planting.

Groups of plants can be moved about effortlessly on paper until what seems like the most harmonious scheme has been developed. This is the way truly artistic gardens are obtained; it also is the most economical way to get results. You can determine on paper just how many plants will be needed and the space they will take.

Good landscape planning program also results in the most efficient use of time and effort; changes made on paper do not have to be made in the garden as is so often the case when thorough planning does not precede planting. Plants that have to be moved because they are in the wrong place are seriously set back when transplanted and it takes time for them to recover.

You don’t have to be an expert draftsman or an artist to draw a garden plan. All you need is a sheet of graph paper, eight to ten lines to the inch to give a scale to work with. Let one small square on the paper represent one square foot in your garden.

All that is needed besides this is a soft pencil, an eraser and some imagination – nothing high tech here. Decide upon the kinds of plants and flowers you want and then locate them on paper so that there will be good color harmony, size, shape and texture relationships.

And dont forget that it is the latter that is as important as the first. Dont think of a garden only in terms of flowers and color. The size, shape and growth habits of plants are equally important.

And texture, the most subtle of the aesthetic qualities, can make a landscape distinctive even when there are only a few flowers present.