How to arrange plants in a garden

Apr 11
23:11

2010

Marek Rafalowicz

Marek Rafalowicz

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For many of us, having a beautiful garden is a lovely dream. We put a great deal of effort, time and money into achieving it, yet often we fail. Why does this happen and what can be done about it?

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How to arrange plants in a garden
For many of us,How to arrange plants in a garden Articles having a beautiful garden is a lovely dream. We put a great deal of effort, time and money into achieving it, yet often we fail. Why does this happen? Why is the final result often not what we hoped for? Well, usually we simply fail to make the appropriate selections and arrangements for the plants (since, in fact, the plants themselves are pretty much the same everywhere, whether it is our garden, or, for example, in the Exbury Gardens). And we fail, well, because it is difficult and for two main reasons in particular:
  • you must have a great deal of horticultural expertise to pick the right plants; and it is important that you know how certain plants will look as they grow, what size the will grow to, when they blossom and whether they will lose leaves in winter, or not. 
  • you must have a great deal of imagination to predict how will the "final product" eventually look like - when all you have at the beginning is an empty backyard and the book with plant images.
To make it worse, remember that you have only one try! It will take years until the plants are grown and then it's too late for corrections! 
Conventional solutions
So usually we choose to do one of the following:
  • base our design on what we've seen elsewhere (safe solution, but well, our garden will not completely ours in this case) 
  • look for help of professional landscape architects (effective, but expensive) 
  • plan our garden on the paper first (not for everyone, you need to have a lot of horticultural expertise not to mention drawing skills) 
  • we just trust our guts and go without any plan 
The downside of all these options is that you still can't experiment to find the best option, you still have only one try. 

Computer technologies 
Perfect solution to these problems came with modern landscape design software. There are several applications available on the market that allow you to plan a garden and render photo-realistic visualizations. They aim to solve our main problems: they have a plant finder that filters out best plants for the specific garden and they allow you to try various arrangements on the screen, which definitely is less risky than trying it in your yard!
When choosing one of these programs it's good idea to pay attention to the ease of use and quality of plant database because these are often weak points. 
Recently completely new solutions came with the Internet. GardenPuzzle is a landscape design program that works directly in your web browser (http://GardenPuzzle.com). It's simple to use - instead of full 3d model, which tends to be too complicated for most of us, you just upload a picture of the garden and then you arrange plants in front of it. The system automatically suggests plants suitable to the soil and climate conditions in your garden. Plant finder allows you to filter the plants by size, type (e.g. conifers, evergreens, creepers, etc.), color (leaves or flowers) and light requirements (for sunny or shaded spots). You may therefore, for example: 
  • first arrange in the background some bigger evergreen plants, which will form a visual barrier throughout the whole year (in order to get appropriate plants you use the plant finder to search for "conifers or evergreen, high") 
  • in the middle you may decide to plant nice deciduous shrubs that will be changing their appearance during different seasons ("average height", "shrubs") 
  • in front arrange some flowers and perennials 
The website allows you to enrich visualization with details such as benches, stones, gazebos, terraces, flower pots and other items typically found in the gardens. Finally, you can print the visualization along with a list of plants and planting plan. 

GardenPuzzle also takes another advantage of putting such software online. With one click you can share your designs on the Internet and ask other users to provide comments or suggest different variants of your project.

Creating the design in such a program takes only a few minutes. This allows you to create a dozen or so options, in order to choose the best that later will be realized. And even if your garden is going to remain virtual, the process of creating is engaging and fun.

Shortcuts:
Create your own garden project online  
Look at the Garden Design Gallery