When I'm working on a garden -- once I know the lay of the land and what my clients prefer -- I'll create a super long plant list. Maybe it'll have 30-40 plants and I'll end up using half. The point is, you want to have more paint than what the canvas can hold, because in the moment of creation you don't know what you'd like to use until you put the brush to that one spot. Of course, the size of those plant lists depends on the size of the garden.
As for the plants themselves, color, size, texture, and shape matter. So does when the plants bloom. But that's only half the story in designing a low-maintenance, sustainable garden for wildlife where we don't want to use fertilizer or mulch, and we want to keep irrigation to a minimum. The other half is matching plants to each other in how they grow above AND below ground, as well as how they reproduce. You wouldn't put an aggressive self sower in a small garden, and you wouldn't place a tame clumper among more energetic growers. Let's see if I can break it down for you in order of design process when looking at plants:
As for the plants themselves, color, size, texture, and shape matter. So does when the plants bloom. But that's only half the story in designing a low-maintenance, sustainable garden for wildlife where we don't want to use fertilizer or mulch, and we want to keep irrigation to a minimum. The other half is matching plants to each other in how they grow above AND below ground, as well as how they reproduce. You wouldn't put an aggressive self sower in a small garden, and you wouldn't place a tame clumper among more energetic growers. Let's see if I can break it down for you in order of design process when looking at plants:
Sometimes I'll jumble up that order a bit depending on what I'm going for and the garden site itself, but at some point ALL of this is coming together, colliding, mingling, and exploding in my head and on the plan.
Let's look at a simple example. Take a small 100' bed in clay soil and sun, a plant list might look like this:
Let's look at a simple example. Take a small 100' bed in clay soil and sun, a plant list might look like this:
The Carex is our living green mulch and will be placed on a grid on 12" centers. Since the fastest spreader here is the aster, and it's the largest plant, we'll use just one (it'll have gobs and gobs of flowers). The heuchera needs larger massing both for the leaves, which will contrast nicely with everything else, and has slightly inconspicuous flowers -- a group of 5 at least. As for the Baptisia and Asclepias a group of three for each. We could add Liatris aspera for late summer bloom (it has a corm, like a bulb), which would be a single plant, or one alone with two together elsewhere. Given the wiry form of Echinacea, and its ability to self sow a bit, we may just do a clump of 3, or even another clump of 2-3.
The taproot plants will dig down below the fibrous plants, so there won't be as much resource competition. And the clumping, thick, fibrous-rooted nature of the sedge should help slow down the self sowers (coneflower) and the root runner (aster).
So that's a little insight into how I think about garden plants when I have the base plan drawn up and go into the nitty gritty. Of course, besides all this practical and aesthetic stuff, I'm also thinking about wildlife. What is the plant a host to, what will it attract and support from egg to wing, and in what amounts and in what diversity? But that's another post.
The taproot plants will dig down below the fibrous plants, so there won't be as much resource competition. And the clumping, thick, fibrous-rooted nature of the sedge should help slow down the self sowers (coneflower) and the root runner (aster).
So that's a little insight into how I think about garden plants when I have the base plan drawn up and go into the nitty gritty. Of course, besides all this practical and aesthetic stuff, I'm also thinking about wildlife. What is the plant a host to, what will it attract and support from egg to wing, and in what amounts and in what diversity? But that's another post.
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