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Garden Design Basics: Setting Ground Rules

© Barbara M. Martin

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This is the season we start a process of what I call "wishful muddling" garden design. With pencil and paper and catalogs at hand, we try to figure out how/where to fit in all the great new stuff we are ordering. And order we do, impulsively and irresponsibly, up until the credit card maxes out .

This is winter madness! We are gardening "inside the (UPS!) box" — a result of cabin fever mixed with enticing catalog pictures, fond and misty garden memories and, occasionally, a sketchy two-dimensional drawing as a guide and substitute for a real plan. Dangerous move!

This is the time when our designs risk falling flat or at least crumbling away. So what should one do to stay sane and on track? First and maybe most important, be aware of the risk. So often those gorgeous plants in the pictures won't thrive at home. Or they will thrive all too well and outgrow their allotted space very quickly. Or they won't fit in at all.

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ANY PLANT IN THE WRONG PLACE IS A WEED

Remember that. Make it your mantra for the coming months! Sometimes we work with catalogs and books and magazines, keeping color theory and foliage texture and general delight in mind until we have obscured some serious design basics. We will regret this later.

The hard truth is this: no matter how lovely a design may seem on paper, even drawn immaculately to scale and reproduced as a blueprint including the funny-looking writing, a drawing is still just a drawing. It may be beautiful in its own right (and many of them are), but remember it is only a limited, static, two-dimensional representation of a dynamic and more than three-dimensional entity. The pretty picture simply doesn't guarantee success in basic mechanical terms once it is put into the garden.

It's bad enough with an actual written plan. There is an absolutely exponential increase in problematics in any gardener's mental pictures devised under the influence of catalogs in winter. Especially those wonderful mental pictures of the garden in its next improved form. Why? For starters, if the "mechanics" are off, there is a definite impediment to enjoyment.

Let's say you routinely fall in the fishpond while taking out the garbage after supper because the narrow bumpy step stone path is obscured by overgrown prickly things and the kids' toys are in the way and the garage lights shine straight into your eyes and all the neighbors get to watch you do this because it's all right there outside their kitchen windows — frankly, I don't care what rare and precious water lily you are coddling, your garden design is not working as well as it should.

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