Planning Your New Landscape

Before planting a new landscape, take the winter to make decisions and plans.

It's not often that you get to start over in a garden. However, if you're building a new house or have purchased a house on an open landscape, it's like working with a blank slate. While most gardeners would love to have such an open canvas to draw on, it can be overwhelming. As much as we complain about trees, walls, and outbuildings altering our plantings, at least we have the "bones" of the garden to work around. In an open meadow or around a newly built home, the flat barrenness creates its own challenges.

It's important to take the time to plan a new landscape on paper before buying all your favorite plants to inhabit the ground. Draw a diagram of your yard with the actual dimensions and compass directions. Sketch out areas that will be for play and entertaining, flower gardens, food production, and other uses. At this stage just use bubble drawings to indicate approximately where these main areas will be in your yard.

Once you know the usage of these areas, then you can start matching the plant to the land. For play and entertaining areas, use grass or durable groundcovers to create space for walking. Place edible gardens close to a water outlet and the house for ease of harvest and maintenance during the growing season. Place flower gardens around the house or in beds relating to the other gardens. Consider mixing small trees and shrubs in with perennial flowers to create a more natural look. For shade in the open landscape, plant fast-growing, picturesque trees such as maple, oak, and ash in areas where you won't block a desired view and out of the way of utility wires and underground power conduits. Always think in terms of five or ten years down the road, and select shrubs and trees that won't quickly outgrow an area but will grow into it over time. Start gradually picking parts of the landscape that you want to focus on first and stage the other areas over time. Your project will seem less daunting that way.