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Adding
Style
To Your
Landscape
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Many homeowners spend the
winter looking through gardening and architecture
magazines looking for pictures of gardens or
landscapes that they would like to create in their
own yard. Most gardening magazines feature gardens
that are created around a certain “style”—English
garden, French cottage garden, formal European,
Tuscan, xeric, alpine, etc. These garden styles
evolved around the use of certain characteristic
plants that were available for the region from which
the garden style originated, and also around certain
design features that were useful to the gardeners of
those regions. Thus each garden style tends to
have its own characteristic approach to the
arrangement of its spaces and its own characteristic
“look”. Traditionally, residential landscapes and
gardens in the United States have tended to blend
several garden or landscape styles producing
generally colorful and attractive landscapes, but at
the same time landscapes which have mostly lost any
sense of “style”. |
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Wyobraskans may be surprised to
find that it would not be at all difficult to create
a flower-filled English garden in their back
yard, or a French country garden , complete
with extensive herbs and a few formal hedges, or a
Tuscan landscape with spire-like
junipers , roses, fruit trees, and trellised grape
vines, and certainly a prairie garden with
ornamental grasses, large wildflower perennials, and
a few evergreen trees is a no-brainer.–Just to name
a few. Southwest, Santa Fe, xeric, and alpine
are some other notable styles which readily adapt
to western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming.
There are admittedly a few
garden styles you may not want to try. A forested
shade garden is going to be difficult—but not
impossible—to create. It’s certainly going to be
easier if you happen to have some existing large
shade trees. |
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Previous Articles
A
Loooooong Winter
March 10
Just Dirt
March 18
Horse Manure & Hot Air
March 25
Mulch
to do this Spring
April 01
Creating Long Term
Tree-lationships
April 15
Spring Blooming
Shrubs & Trees
April 22
New
and Improved
Nebraska Arbor Day
April 29
A
Normal Spring
May 6
The Winter of Eight Moons
May 13
2009
Articles
2008 Articles
2007 Articles
2006 Articles
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There seems to be a renewed interest in “style”
among American homeowners these days. If you’re one
of those American homeowners looking to give a
distinctive landscape style to your home landscape
here’s a few tips on how to get started. Go ahead
and find those magazine pictures that strike your
fancy. What will catch your eye will probably be a
combination of plant appearance, arrangement of the
spaces, and the level of visual order or
organization in the featured landscape. Pay
attention to all of these aspects of your favorite
garden or landscape pictures. Then ask yourself
what it is about those gardens that appeals to
you—is it the sense of wide open spaces, or perhaps
how secluded and intimate the human spaces in those
pictures seem. Are the features of the garden or
landscape highly ordered and symmetrical or are they
more naturalized and visually less organized? What
plants catch your eye, and why? Is it their color,
their form, or perhaps the texture of their
foliage? Answering these questions will help you
translate those magazine pictures into a landscape
that has that same look or feel right in your own
back yard. The key is to understand that the
picture in the magazine needs to be “translated”
into a design approach and a plant palette that
works in Wyobraska—(more on that topic next week. )
The good news here is that the
climate and soils of western Nebraska and eastern
Wyoming offer the region’s homeowners the
opportunity to adopt a wide range of landscape and
garden styles—in fact, the choices of landscape
styles open to Wyobraskans is greater than the range
of choices available to residents of most other
regions of the United States. Our abundant
sunshine and semi-arid climate are the keys to our
many choices of landscape styles. And while our
indigenous soils are not particularly fertile and
could limit our choice of styles, amending landscape
or garden soil to grow a wide range of landscape
plants is neither expensive nor difficult.
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And the garden styles that are based on long, gentle
springs are not advised. In other words don’t try
to replicate the cherry blossoms on the mall in
Washington, D.C., or the unforgettable displays of
azaleas and rhododendrons at the Master’s golf
tournament in Georgia. Those garden styles are not
well-suited to Wyobraska. And it probably won’t
work to try to create a New England –like display of
fall foliage in your home landscape, either.
Certainly some fall color is possible, but to try to
make that the major feature of your “style” will
likely lead to frustration. An easy way to find
garden or landscape styles that work in Wyobraska ,
and to avoid those that don’t, is to look through
the summer issues of gardening magazines. Summer
is the feature season in our indigenous landscape,
so other styles which are also at their best in the
summer tend to work well here.
So if you’re one of those American homeowners
wanting to add more “style” to your landscape, start
looking through your favorite gardening magazines
for your “style” and next week I’ll offer a few easy
tips about how to create that magazine picture in
your own home landscape.
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