Find Your Virginia Plant Community, Part 3 - Design Basics!
We are picking up this week’s blog with your native plant community that you chose last week, and discussing how to begin assembling them into a design! Hopefully you’ve got a good mix of trees (canopy and/or understory, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, and groundcover. My general rule of thumb with these is that the larger the plant, the less you will use (i.e. you can only fit so many giant Live Oaks onto a site). To recap, for this plant community, we are using the following plants- Live Oak (evergreen tree), Waxmyrtle (evergreen shrub), Bitter Switchgrass, Yarrow, Prickly Pear, Goldenrod, and Hyssop Leaved Eupatorium for a yellow/ white/ green palette.
Borrowing again from the DCR publication, here are some sample photos (by Gary P. Fleming) of Dune Scrub communities.
While these communities are not unattractive, it may not be the aesthetic you want (or are allowed) to have in your front yard. Most of my clients come to me saying that they would like something that looks “more intentional.”
For this example, we are going to look at a client’s home that happens to have several large Live Oak trees on the site, and even has some Prickly Pear coming up as well!
Just playing around with the plants from our palette, we may come up with something like this (below). We still have our existing Live Oak tree, have added some evergreen Wax Myrtle along the base of the hill to help screen the entry from the busy street a bit, and groupings of some of the other plants in visible areas, like around the tree, at the mailbox, and near the base of the entry stairs.
What do you notice about how the plants are arranged in the photo? Do they still impart a somewhat natural aesthetic for the informal space, but not feel as though they were simply thrown in? Notice that we did not simply take 1 or 2 of everything from the plant community list and put them in the ground (as I see many people do). While that may increase the overall biodiversity, and certainly has a place, that place may not be your front yard. That doesn’t mean however, that you can’t bring more habitat to your space. It simply means that it can be done in a way that looks more intentional. How do we do that?
Design Tips
Limit your plant palette. We’ve done this in both number of species and colors in this space. This example has a palette of greens, whites, and yellows.
Using a (relatively) limited number of plants or colors and repeating them throughout the space creates a feeling of cohesion.
Create groupings.
As you get into your shrubs, herbaceous perennials, groundcovers, use no less than 3-5 of a plant. Again, this creates the impression that something was intentionally planted, and not just a lone weed popping up. (Larger groupings of plants can also be easier for pollinators and birds to find visually.)
Plant larger things in the back of the bed, smaller things toward the front.
It appears visually less chaotic when you can see the different layers of the planting.
In this example, by the mailbox, you see the taller grass and Goldenrod around the mailbox, with some lower Yarrow surrounding it with it's evergreen foliage functioning as the groundcover.
If you received a large tray of tiny grass plugs in the mail (or from me) and didn’t realize that the mature size of the plant is 3-4’, you might think the grass could function as your short groundcover, as a Carex might (below pic). This could make a very pleasing design in the short term. However, when the plants grow to their mature size, you will have a mess of grasses hiding all your other plants.
In the end, your designed community may look something like this, or something completely different! Take time to play around with different arrangements and find something you like. Have fun, and remember that a landscape is never done, it’s always changing and growing.
In the next blog, we will continue to talk about general native plant design tips, and how to create a landscape that provides habitat, but won’t have the neighbors calling the City on you for neglect.
