Layered Design

Written by Jungle Jim

I talked about making sure that you give plants enough room in my last post. Here I want to write about planting so you see the individual plants in the design. You do this by giving your plants enough three dimensional space to show off.

We have all seen plantings where there is a mixture of plants but they have all grown to about the same size. This is often done in a four foot planting area. All too often we see Photinea, Bottlebrush, Escallonia and Euonymus planted to the edge of the planter bed and pruned to the top of the fence.

Even in larger planting areas you see too many different plants that grow or are pruned to the same height.

The result is you can’t see anything but a fuzzy mess of foliage.

Even in four foot planters you can use small eight foot patio trees together with some four foot bushes and two foot bushes and a vine on the fence. This results in separation between the plants, allows you to actually see the different plants and creates some sense of depth.

If you look at our plantings at the street and our planting around our waterfall you can see what I mean.

In addition we have a hand out that shows this concept. Come in and ask for our ‘Easy Care Garden Design’ handout.

Happy planting!

Jungle Jim