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Landscaping
Fractions
1/2
+ 1/3 = OOH LA LA
The important fraction to remember when designing
and selecting the plants for your new landscape is
one-third. |
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Your seventh grade
math teacher was right, after all. Fractions are
important. I am aware that bringing up the subject
of fractions may cause some readers to have a
recurrence of painful and now long-suppressed
classroom experiences. So if you are one of those
people who are still discussing fractions with
either your psychologist or your bartender, don’t
worry, because landscaping fractions are simple. In
fact there are really only two fractions to remember
when planning a landscape—halves, and thirds—and
here’s the good news, you don’t have to add or
subtract them.
One-half is the fraction to
remember when designing and installing a new
landscape. When designing your landscape spend half
of your time thinking about how you want to live in
your landscape and the other half of your time
actually planning the landscape. A common mistake
that I see homeowners make when designing their own
landscape is that they start out designing “the
landscaping” without ever designing “the
landscape”. Here’s the difference. The landscape
is the size and arrangement of the outdoor rooms,
the landscaping is the plants, mulch, edging, etc.,
that make those outdoor rooms visually interesting
and pleasant places in which to spend time. Or to
put it another way, the landscape is the floor plan,
and the landscaping is the décor. So when designing
the landscape for your home, spend the first half of
the time designing the floor plan, and the second
half of the time designing the décor.
One-half is also the fraction
to remember when developing the budget for your
landscape project. Whatever the budget is for your
landscape project, only half of it should be spent
on plants. The other half should be spent on all of
the preparation necessary to insure that your plants
will thrive in their new home—soil amendment,
irrigation, mulch, edging, etc. On a typical
landscape project these costs will add up to about
half of the total budget. And when you find out
that your budget isn’t quite big enough for your
project—my advise is to reduce your plant budget,
not the half of the budget for soil amendment,
irrigation, and mulch. While it’s tempting to get
all of the pretty plants in the ground as soon as
possible, it’s the other half of your landscape
budget that will allow your new plants to stay
pretty through the coming years without a lot of
work. |
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The important
fraction to remember when designing and selecting
the plants for your new landscape is one-third. I’m
a person that believes that rules are meant to be
broken but the one rule I try never to break is the
Wyobraska Landscape Design Rule of Thirds, or WLDRoT,
for short. The Wyobraska landscapes that draw rave
reviews every season of the year mostly follow this
rule. And here it is. The visual mass of a
Wyobraska landscape should be one-third evergreen
plants (trees & shrubs), one-third deciduous plants
(trees & shrubs), and one third perennial plants
(perennials & ornamental grasses).
The one-third evergreen trees
and shrubs provide structure to the landscape plus
summer background for flowers, and winter color and
background for grasses, perennial stalks and seed
heads, and colorful winter shrubs like red-twigged
dogwood. These evergreen plants add important and
steady color to the landscape through the long
visual winter of a Wyobraska landscape (mid-October
through mid-April). This is so important, that I
pick and place the evergreens first.
The one-third deciduous trees
and shrubs provides year round structure to the
landscape (along with the evergreen trees and
shrubs), but also provides spring color with blooms,
fall color with changing leaf color, and possibly
winter interest with colorful, persistent fruit.
Flowering crabapples and shrub roses are good
examples. Because they are the other big plants in
the landscape (after the evergreen trees and
shrubs), I select them second.
Finally, the
one-third perennials and ornamental grasses provide
the bold summertime color and the dramatic seasonal
change that is the unique visual signature of the
Wyobraska landscape. Some don’t emerge from the
ground until late May, but still reach heights as
high as 10-12 feet. With blooms as early as April
and as late as November, the right perennial and
ornamental grass combinations create a continuously
evolving landscape scene from late March through
late November, filling the landscape with dramatic
combinations of color, texture, and form. And
winter winds and snow only gradually begin to fade
the colors and break the stems, so it’s not until
around mid-February or even early March that one’s
eye begins to |
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Previous Articles
Yardner March 8, 2007
2006 Articles |
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say that it’s
time to cut back some of those plants. By
the way, I select the perennials and ornamental
grasses last when designing a landscape—not because
they are less important, but because as the smallest
plants in the landscape, they can be selected to
find all of the spaces which remain after the larger
trees and shrubs are selected and arranged.
See, that’s all the harder
landscape fractions get. Now get your denominator
out of that easy chair, and get to work!
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