Planting Fundamentals

Planting Fundamentals

Plant-driven garden design blends function with fun.

Your lawn is gone. You’ve made a list of favorite native plants, researched the perfect fruit trees, and coveted your neighbor’s spectacular succulents for far too long.

But before heading to the nursery, consider these fundamentals of planting design to help you make the most of your plant selections. All plants mentioned here are suited to our summer-dry climate, though check for their hardiness if your area dips much below freezing.

Visualize how much more your plants can do for your garden than simply being decorations or space fillers. Just like the architecture and furniture of your home, plants—in their infinite forms and sizes—can accomplish a great deal. They can delineate a seating area or encourage strolling along a particular route. They can create a privacy screen or strategically block an eyesore. They can frame an entry or a distant view.

For plants that will perform these structural jobs, opt for those that grow not much larger than the desired size and shape, so they look natural and only need occasional pruning. If you want a fast-growing screen, look into a plant’s ultimate size, or you may end up on a ladder with shears every month.

Some wonderful not-too-tall screens that are easily managed include these three Australian beauties: the graceful snowy river wattle (Acacia boormanii), the dazzling cut-leaf banksia (Banksia praemorsa), and the slim bottlebrush (Callistemon viminalis Slim). Our native wild lilac (Ceanothus Ray Hartman) with its shiny foliage and blue flower spikes is stunning.

For structure well below eye level, try some of the more compact coast rosemaries (Westringia Smokey, W. ‘Morning Light and W. Gray Box), rock fuchsia (Correa glabra Coliban River) and the strap-leafed steely blue flax lilly (Dianella Baby Bliss).

Aim for a good balance of plant heights in your garden, and you’ll be rewarded with a sense of well-being as you wander through it. Distinct plantings on the ground plane, in the middle ground, and on an upper story—like a floor, walls and ceiling—also add dimension to the garden and echo the scale of the house.

With the garden’s structure grounded in well-behaved yet handsome workhorses, there’s plenty of room for some dazzle and fun. Every outdoor space craves a focal point or three (best to avoid even numbers if you’re not going for strict symmetry). What makes a good focal point other than the classic gurgling fountain or painted bench? A plant specimen that is large and distinctive enough to stand on its own yet harmonizes with the mood and theme of the garden. It could be anything from a boldly variegated succulent to a potted citrus tree to a dramatic upright grass.

Now with the structural backbone players and the focal-point divas of the garden established, you’re faced with choosing from among a cast of thousands of plants for the remainder of your planting areas. To greatly simplify this easily daunting task, keep focused on a small palette of plants that offers both subtle harmony and bold contrast.

The easiest and most effective way to achieve a pleasing palette is to look at foliage as the primary, mostly permanent characteristic of the plants and the flowers as temporary, sometimes fleeting special features.

How do you know what kind of leaf looks good next to another kind of leaf? The best method is to go for the greatest contrast possible, either in texture or color or both. By counterposing very distinct foliage types, you allow each one to set off the other. For example, place a large, blue-green octopus agave (Agave vilmoriana) with its few broad leaves next to the hundreds of fine blades of a blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens). Or in a shady spot, combine the fist-sized foliage of island alum root (Heuchera Maxima) with the delicate fronds of deer fern (Blechnum Spicant).

When selecting flowering plants and determining their placement in the garden, keep in mind their foliage and flower color. There are plenty of rules about complementary colors (yellow loves purple, burgundy marries with silver and chartreuse), but really you should decide what makes you happy, and then consider dialing it back a little.

To ensure you’ll have some flower color during most of the year, select plants with differing bloom times. It’s easy to find spring and summer bloomers, but be sure to include autumn-flowering plants like Australian fuchsia (Correa), California fuchsia (Zauschneria) and lions’ tail (Leonotus leonuris). Dependable winter bloomers include aloes, grevilleas, flowering currants (Ribes sanguineum) and Mexican marigold (Tagetes lemonnii compacta).

Imagine wallpaper or curtains or a Moroccan tile floor, or any song with a catchy chorus, and you’ll understand why pattern and repetition are so important in a garden. They allow the eye to become familiar with a theme and delight in the comfort of recognizing it again and again. Like a visual meditation, repeated forms, textures and colors make the garden a place of peace. Even if you love the idea of a riot of blooms and intriguing foliage colors, make those the accents in the garden, resting on a sea of similarities.

The quieter, repeating plants are especially important on the ground plane, where the eye seeks a place to rest. But this space doesn’t need to mimic the monochromatic rectangular or kidney-shaped lawn. It can be a meandering meadow of airy grasses and delicate flowers, a modernistic no-mow mound, or irregular massings of large grassy plants such as dwarf mat rush (Lomandra longifolia Breeze), Berkeley sedge (Carex divulsa) and pine muhly (Muhlenbergia dubia).

Across the Easy Bay there are numerous outstanding nurseries and public garden treasures where you can find inspiration for your low-water landscape. It’s time to get outside and play with some plants.

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Anne Weinberger is a garden and landscape designer based in Piedmont.


East Bay Public Gardens

UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley
200 Centennial Drive, Berkeley
BotanicalGarden.Berkeley.edu

Regional Parks Botanic Garden at Tilden
Wildcat Canyon Road and South Park Drive, Berkeley
www.EBParks.org/page156.aspx

The Gardens at Lake Merritt
666 Belleview Ave., Oakland
www.GardensAtLakeMerritt.org

The Ruth Bancroft Garden
1552 Bancroft Road, Walnut Creek
www.RuthBancroftGarden.org

The Gardens at Heather Farm
1540 Marchbanks Drive, Walnut Creek
www.GardensHF.org

Markham Nature Park & Arboretum
1202 La Vista Ave., Concord
www.MarkhamArboretum.org

Faces of the East Bay