Almost anything goes when it comes to making a landscape design fit the personalities of the people using it, but some design errors can create a lack of harmony and comfort. Here are my top 10 picks of the most common landscape design faux pas.
• 1. Not fitting in with your surroundings. Look around. Try to generally match the theme of your area. This shouldn't keep you from having a different style -- water feature, Japanese garden, putting green -- but these are often in the back yard. Unifying with the neighborhood is usually the goal in the front yard. If you build a huge contrasting, patterned, colored walk and driveway, it might clash with its environs, because paving in neighborhoods generally matches. A front-yard wildflower meadow will not be aesthetically pleasing if lawns grace the fronts of other homes on your street. Instead, have some lawn or a single species of low-growing ground cover. Plant your wildflowers closer to the house, at the side or in the back yard.
Planting hedges where the driveway meets the street is a safety issue. Pulling out of the driveway can be hazardous because visibility is restricted.
(Joel M. Lerner For The Washington Post)
|
|
On the flip side, you might live in a community with all natural plantings. Then, meticulously manicured lawn edges and beds filled with rows of shrubbery wouldn't fit. This is a place for wildflowers or random woodland gardens. Lawn would be used only where it serves a purpose for paths, buffers around the house, level spaces to kick a ball or other practical uses.
• 2. Planting before planning. As long as you are willing to design in trial-and-error fashion, on site and in the garden, then this could work as one planning method. It simply carries with it the task of digging and moving plants and changing patio and walk lines in the field as work progresses. You should first move the plants and paths with pencil and paper. It's a lot easier on the back. There will be plenty of time to play around with digging and planting later. Generally, if you like what you draw, it will look good installed in the landscape.
• 3. Installing plants in a "one of each" fashion. It is understandable why this happens -- often because people plant before they plan. When you bought mums this fall, did you mass the same colors together? Or did you have trouble choosing and so got one or two of each? The same colors should have been planted together. The bulbs should have been massed the same way, at least 10 of the same species and color together. You have to be strong willed enough at the garden center to choose just a few colors. This holds true for all your plant choices.
• 4. Using trees, shrubs and perennials as if they are furniture. It takes seven to 10 years for shrubs to reach their full potential, longer for trees, and some plants never do. Sometimes, it is simply a process of removing one plant and replacing it with a more desirable species, as you learn what will thrive. Patience is the virtue you need. It would be great to have the luxury of installing a specimen at the size and with the habit that you want. However, plants are dynamic, living, growing entities with minds of their own -- not couches picked to fit the space that's there today.
• 5. Installing plants without determining mature size. The chance of creating a maintenance headache and wasting costly plant material increases as you place plants too close together or against the walls of your house (unless you are training something to grow there). This is a consequence of using plants as furniture and comes from buying a "garden-center-sized" plant and not understanding that it will attain a much greater size as years pass. Professional designers are as guilty of this incorrect landscape design technique as amateurs. A professional's job is to make the landscape look full and lush and to not disappoint clients. But it's better for the plant to be spaced properly to attain the ornamental characteristics you chose it for rather than to have a crowded garden in five years.
• 6. Using deciduous trees as screening plants. A lot of home gardeners leave the lower limbs on trees such as dogwoods and redbuds because they offer screening. These deciduous trees are more effective in the landscape when the lower limbs are pruned and the understory is planted with interesting flowering shrubs and perennials. Exceptions to the rule are trees that are so small they never grow tall enough to have a canopy. Some of the trees that should have all limbs trimmed at least six feet from the ground are large shade trees, upright growing Japanese maples, flowering cherries, dogwoods, redbuds, goldenrain trees, crab apples, deciduous magnolias, stewartias and river birches. The way to train them is to prune the lowest limbs at the trunk as the trees grow taller and always prune suckers, or water sprouts, as they grow from the base of the plants.
• 7. Mulching beds too copiously with ornamental bark. People mistakenly think ornamental hardwood bark improves soil. In their efforts to enhance the landscape, they pile it on. Deep layers of bark mulch do three things: keep air, moisture and nutrients from reaching the roots; kill plants when piled high against their bark; and, according to research by Frances Gouin, a retired University of Maryland horticulture professor, cause manganese toxicity in soils where hardwood bark mulch has been spread four to five inches thick. Use bark mulch sparingly to prevent weeds, hold moisture and give a clean, finished appearance. Never spread more than a one- to two-inch layer.
• 8. Designing stairs without considering lighting. This is often the least-thought-out aspect of stairs. You should light all steps from above without casting shadows that hide the walking surface. Certain types of lights at the front or back door of the house will sometimes cast a shadow that hides steps. Lights for decks are usually considered, but again, the lighting is often a floodlight to illuminate the deck and yard without thought to the stairs that will get you from one place to the other. Of course, the best time to see how the lighting will look is at night.
• 9. Designing "trip steps." People generally do not notice a single step in a path. So, where there are slight grade changes you are better off installing two low steps than one "trip step." Risers of varying heights in a set of stairs are also a good reason to walk cautiously. The disparities in height will throw the users off balance and send them to the ground. This happened to me on brick steps that had such a subtle difference it was barely noticeable, but when the step wasn't where I expected it to be, I fell. The most comfortable step riser you can create is one where the risers are all six inches, the treads measure 14 inches and there are at least two steps and no more than 10 in a course without a landing.
• 10. Shrubs or trees obstructing visibility at a driveway entry. Many homeowners plant shrubs or trees to mark the entries to their properties and to create privacy. If you can't see 300 feet in both directions from your car before approaching the street, the plantings are too close to the road and present a hazard that makes it very difficult to see oncoming pedestrians or autos before pulling into traffic. Check your sightline from the driver's seat while your car is at the entry of your driveway. There should be no obstacles blocking visibility for as far as possible in both directions before any part of your car enters the road.
Have a safe, healthy and happy new year.
Joel M. Lerner is president of Environmental Design in Capitol View Park, Md. E-mail or contact him through his Web site, www.gardenlerner.com.
