Planning Makes Perfect

By Valerie Brennan, Winona, Minnesota

Die-hard gardeners will tell you that a garden is a work in progress. Even established gardens require a little tweaking from season to season. But if you thoughtfully plan before you plant, your landscape will beautifully endure for years to come without costly and time-consuming alterations or additions.

With gardening chores on the back burner for most of us, winter is the ideal time to think about the upcoming growing season. You'll find inspiration in the numerous mail-order nursery catalogs spilling into your mailbox. Spend a few snowy days at the library flipping through gardening books and magazines in search of garden designs that appeal to your personal tastes. Then follow these 25 tips to sketch out landscapes that are sure to flourish with minimal upkeep and without pricey do-overs.

1. Take advantage of leafless panoramas. With most trees and shrubs showing only bare bones, winter is a fine time for spotting ho-hum holes in your landscape. Check for areas that could use a punch of winter interest—consider adding evergreens, berry-bearing shrubs and trees with interesting forms or bark to boost four-season appeal.

2. Know your site. Spend a day or two checking how many hours of sun your gardens receive each day to ensure you incorporate light-appropriate plants into your design. Keep in mind that full-sun plants require at least 6 hours of sun, partial-shade plants need between 3 and 6 hours and shade-tolerant plants benefit from 2 or 3 hours of direct light or from receiving indirect or filtered light all day.

3. Consider the big picture. Sketch out an overall picture of your yard, including entertaining areas, your house and other buildings. Enlarge the sketch and mark off existing landscape features like trees, shrubs and gardens. Pencil in proposed plantings to see how they fit within the existing landscape.

4. Allow plenty of room. Design extra-deep borders large enough to house an array of low, medium and tall plants and that allow you extra space to add more plants as the mood strikes.

5. Pace off measurements. Before you sketch, estimate the amount of space you wish to dedicate to a planting bed. Use the measurements to draw up a to-scale blueprint on graph paper. Keeping in mind plants' mature sizes, pencil in desired plants to get a realistic idea of how many you can fit into the space.

6. Color in the lines. On your plan, use markers, watercolors or colored pencils to color in existing plantings. Then color in your planned additions to make certain that the old and new hues complement each other.

7. Make like a landscape pro. Design gardens that carry the eye from earth to sky. Anchor borders and beds with structural plants, such as trees or tall shrubs, and then layer in climbing vines, smaller shrubs, varying-height perennials and sprawling ground covers.

8. Settle on a style. Determine whether you're going for a clipped formal look, casual cottage appeal, a native prairie or a combination of styles.

9. Pick a palette. Are you partial to pastels? Do red-hot hues get your creative juices flowing? Working within a color scheme will help you set a cohesive scene and prevent you from buying unsuitable plants at weaker moments.

10. Lay the groundwork. When planning your design, include pathways, arbors, ponds, large containers, fountains, statuary and garden benches that draw both foot traffic and attention through the garden.

11. Cultivate perennials for pennies. Designate a sunny corner for growing perennials from seed. Sow the seeds in early spring, and by mid- to late summer, you'll have loads of plants to fill out your borders.

12. Add raised beds for vegetable, herb and cutting gardens. Growing your own produce and easy-care annual flowers for summer arrangements save money. Plus, raised beds take less time to weed.

13. Create a budget. Determine how much you want to spend for this year's plantings, mulch and soil amendments. Plan on putting in paths and buying the larger, structural plants first. When budgets are tight, think about filling in your design over the course of several years.

14. Reiterate a scheme. Plan on replicating plant forms, colors and textures to easily fashion flow, a sense of movement and a harmonious whole.

15. Forget the finicky. Opt to include native plants or ones that are hardy and reliable in your planting zone—you won't have to replace them down the road.

16. Look for deals. Many spring garden catalogs offer bare-root forsythia, hydrangea and red-twig dogwood saplings for a couple of bucks or less. The stick-like, rooted saplings take a few years to fill out and flower, but their bargain-basement prices allow you to mass their forms inexpensively or to add them throughout the landscape as a repeating element.

17. Invest in gardener's gold. Incorporate plants—such as daylily, hosta, bearded iris, bee balm, purple coneflower and yarrow—that you can divide in a few years for more (free!) plants.

18. Think foliage, not flowers. Sketch in plants with silver, gray, chartreuse, variegated and bright-colored foliage for gardens that remain colorful as flowers fade.

19. Consider every season. Slot in plants with different bloom times to ensure a succession of blossoms throughout the year.

20. Plant a living wall. Pencil in trellises, hedges and plant groupings to camouflage unattractive views, define garden rooms and buffer traffic noise.

21. Supersize it. You'll fill a lot of space without spending big bucks if you include large, quick-growing plants, such as Russian sage, fountain grasses, Autumn Joy sedum, hydrangea and shrub roses like Carefree Delight, Knockout and Magic Carpet.

22. Contemplate companions. Peruse garden books, plant catalogs and Web sites for garden images that showcase appealing plant combinations that you can duplicate in your design.

23. Pair like-minded partners. Group plants with similar light, water and soil requirements together—if you plant water-thirsty cultivars with drought-tolerant plants, you're sure to lose one or both to either too-dry conditions or root rot.

24. Enhance the wow factor. Add one or two plant groupings or shrubs that are sure to stop passersby in their tracks.

25. Vary forms and textures. Incorporate plants with ferny fronds, grassy spires, coarse spikes, fuzzy foliage, waxy surfaces and broad leaves in varying mounded, cascading and upright forms.