Planning Your Planting

What better way to counteract winter's chill than planning new garden beds for springtime planting.

The Inferno Strip Garden
Item # 99517 		Soft Colors Inferno Strip Garden

each $180.23
3 or more Gardens $170.23
The 'Colors and Textures' Garden
Item # 99518 		The 'Colors and Textures' Garden
Designed by Lauren Springer-Ogden

Garden $172.23
  • Topic: Winter Care
  • Keywords: planning, design, winter, seeds, Planting Techniques
  • Date: December 2001

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So the weather outside is (supposed to be) frightful, and what better way to counteract winter’s chill than planning new garden beds for springtime planting. This is the time of year when you want to stay curled up by the fire perusing plant catalogs, making dreamy lists of all you will plant when the ground thaws.

Your lists grow, you place the calls or hop on the Internet to order and wait with expectation for the ship dates of your new plants. Here’s an often-overlooked question: do you know where they’re all going to go?

The best advice we can give before you start dog-earing pages is to know just what it is you’re looking for—or else you’re liable to end up with twenty 5’ salvias and some creeping thyme groundcover which will, admit it, look rather silly planted by themselves in a garden bed.

It’s easy to go crazy with a shopping cart or a catalog, falling in love with all the blue flowering plants, or those that have dusty silver leaves. But if you plant nothing but these personal favorites they tend to lose their power. Garden design has as its basic premise that grouping plants through contrast provides a better means of showcasing favorites than organizing beds around similar plant characteristics. There are elegant exceptions, of course, but as a general rule of thumb aim to highlight differences.

You’ll start out on the right foot if you avoid the pitfall many gardeners fall into by paying little attention to such things as the height of the plants at maturity or the season in which they flower. Remember that your gardening palette is both three-dimensional and temporal—when using this palette to paint, the resulting canvas will change shape and color throughout the seasons.

And take in to consideration the space you have to work with in designing your beds, recollecting that garden beds tend to work best when they flow from one plot to the next without jarring the viewer out of a more natural experience.

A garden design doesn’t have to be extensive (if you’re a beginning gardener it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the magnificence of your project). However, the simplest plot can benefit from some forethought, and the best way to achieve a consistency in your garden is to put your aims down on paper.

So write out what you’re trying to achieve with your planting, whether it be screening your kitchen window from the neighbors or growing a tranquil place to put a bench. Then use graph paper to sketch out your means of achieving these aims and voila! A plan has come into being.

Of course, the last thing to remember about garden design is that none of it is fixed in stone. If you put something in the wrong place this year, then dig it up and move it next year. Maybe that ’s the real reason why we prefer to paint our landscapes with leaves and flowers instead of permanent marker.