One client wanted a classic, contemporary look with minimal maintenance. The landscape should look good all year long, and color comes from foliage contrast, not flowers that have to be clipped after blooming. The other wanted a haven for birds, especially hummingbirds, something full of flowers and seeds, where seasonal maintenance was and accepted trade-off for a garden ablaze with color and life in spring and summer.
Each style of landscape has inherent qualities. Something with a lot of flowers will need trimming. If the garden is also for seeds, it can’t be trimmed until the spent flower stalks have yielded their seeds to local birds, long after they stop bearing flowers. If the garden combines flowers and water saving in a Mediterranean climate, it will probably go dormant or partially dormant in the dry season – and the same goes for anything using herbaceous perennials. A garden based on evergreen foliage and foliage color contrasts will look about the same year round, but won’t have explosive color nor likely attract the range of insects and birds that visit a flower-filled landscape.
The moral? Each design should grow from it’s owner’s preferences, needs and uses. It should fit their lifestyle, reflecting their aesthetics.
Classic Landscape
This design features a lot of sedges and lomandras. These are grassy-looking plants that don’t have the same maintenance issues as true grasses. They don’t have flower stalks to remove. They’re evergreen, so they don’t need cutting back every year with the required unsightly regrowing period. The foundation shrubs are likewise evergreen, selected for being carefree in their climate and soil.
Once it grows in, the garden will form a tapestry of foliage colors that complement the home and enhance curb appeal. The low fence creates a sense of enclosure and the steps lead the eye to the entry, a clean and straightforward design that values simplicity with just enough variety to keep things interesting.
Simplicity is key here. Soothing textures, gradients of color, clean simple lines in the hardscape. All create a soothing effect and enhance the house’s architecture.
The garden still has a couple of years of growth before it looks mature – but that’s a good thing. If it looked good now, it would require thinning out sooner than needed when the plants are spaced wider apart at planting.
Habitat / Water Conserving Garden
This type of garden is not often shown in winter. They’re shown at peak bloom, to emphasize how wonderful they are at peak seasons. This garden will be covered in flowers soon enough, buzzing with hummingbirds and other garden visitors. There’s a bird bath that attracts birds all year, and dense shrubs for habitat – and the old birch tree is a great place for them to perch.
This style of garden also has more spaces for interaction. There’s a looped path, a bench under the tree that overlooks an area featuring a bird bath and hummingbird plants. Butterflies will visit, hummingbirds will sip nectar and a variety of birds will come to the bird bath.
Complexity is more key here. There are perennial flowers, annual wildflowers, food plants for butterflies, nectar sources for hummingbirds, pollen sources for bees, foliage for nesting. Many plants are fragrant. Others are bold, interacting with fine-textured mass plantings.
