Think ahead when landscaping

The biggest and most frustrating problem with most landscapes is plants that get too big. Overgrown shrubs are the most common reason why people are unhappy with their landscaping and want to do it over.

It’s possible to shear, prune and trim shrubs to contain them, but as soon as you stop paying attention, they try to grow to the size nature intended. Next thing you know, they’re blocking your front walk, hiding the view out your windows, rubbing your siding and turning your porch into a dark tunnel.

When plants are young and small, it can be hard to visualize how large they will be when they’re fully grown. Often, the dimensions listed on the plant tag can’t be trusted. More often, optimistic landscapers simply accept a lifetime of shearing rather than choosing plants the right size and shape for the spaces they have.

It’s easy to fall in love with a plant and buy it without really understanding what size and shape it will ultimately be when it grows up.

Most plants are labeled with their typical height and spread. That can be very misleading if the plants are typically sheared or cut back in landscapes, and the label assumes you’re going to do the same.

Left alone, Taxus yews grow to 12 feet; “compact” burning bushes grow to 8 feet tall (see photo), and a single Forsythia can colonize your entire yard. You’d never see that on the label.

We do landscape design at our nursery and a large number of landscape “retrofits” each year. Most often, we have to remove overgrown plants before we start.

Our step-by-step design process has an iron-clad rule: Choose the plants last. You read that right. Choosing plants is the very last step of our landscape design process.

That’s because we choose plants based on all the other design steps. We’re not in love with any plant; there are thousands of plants to choose from, and there have to be intelligent reasons behind the choice of any particular one.

Does that mean you can’t have your favorite plant in your landscape? No. Let’s just make sure it fits the overall design, passes the “common sense test” for easy maintainability, and has the right conditions for it to thrive.

Let’s understand how that plant will look five years from now, or 10 or 20, because time passes very quickly. What looks perfect today can easily become a maintenance nightmare, an eyesore or even dangerous.

Look around you and see how many overgrown, neglected and even downright ugly landscape plants are clinging to life in your neighbor’s yards. It’s no wonder people get frustrated and just cut everything down because it’s in the way, not maintainable, not flattering to the home, and not even healthy in many cases. At best, it’s a plant collection and not a landscape.

There is hope. There are, in fact, many landscape plants that are truly “dwarf,” and there are places for large plants in your landscape. The “right” plant might be one you’ve never heard of, but if you saw a mature example in the right setting, you’d probably want one for yourself.

The very first step in choosing one is to figure out how wide and how high you want the plant to be years from now when it’s fully grown. Armed with that information and an open mind, you can go to a good nursery and choose from many interesting and beautiful plants.

Spending an hour or two with a good designer can help tremendously. First, do a little preparation. See how at www.goodseedfarm.com/ArticleDesign-Homework-Assignment.htm.

Steve Boehme and his wife, Marjorie, own GoodSeed Nursery & Landscape near Winchester.