Home Landscaping: Mississauga Planting Bed Design
For green thumb gardeners that enjoy doing their own landscaping, designing and installing a planting bed is a fun and exciting project. For your planting to look its best, it is important to put as much effort into the design as you do for the actual planting. It can mean the difference between a messy jumble of plants and an elegant array of textures and colour that complements your home. Here are a few tips for making your planting beds work better in the landscape.
Every Plant Has a Purpose
In a well designed landscape, every plant has a purpose and is there for a reason. Sometimes, it’s an artistic reason, to contrast with another plant or to balance a group of plants. Sometimes, it’s a functional purpose, such as including evergreen trees in your landscaping. Mississauga winters are cold; conifers can serve as a windbreak.
Your overall planting bed should have a purpose, too. It can create depth in your front yard, screen the view of a neighbor’s playset or serve to attract butterflies and birds to your yard.
Planting Bed Layout
Use a garden hose or length of rope to mark the boundary of the bed before you start digging. It’s a great way to visualize the bed and helps you create smooth, flowing lines. Curved edges are nice, but don’t make them random. They should flare out around larger plants or at either end. Where the bed meets a walk or drive, make the angle close to 90 degrees. Avoid small, awkward shapes in the adjacent lawn that will make grass cutting and lawn maintenance difficult.
Use stakes to mark the location of each plant, or better yet, arrange the actual plants in their containers before you start digging holes.
Unless you are planting along a fence or boundary, you generally want planting beds to be wider across your yard, side to side, and less deep, front to back. That will create a sense of depth in the yard.
Layers of Plants
Imagine that your plants will be in three layers, a ground layer, middle layer and a canopy. Start with the canopy layer; where do the large trees need to be? Arrange the middle layer – shrubs and small trees – next. Have the groundcovers and other small plants fill in spaces and flow around the other plants. If possible, make the ground level plants continuous or in no more than two sections.
Also, create layers from front to back. Place the lowest plants on the side you will be looking toward most often; the taller plants along the back.
Your Mississauga grass cutting service has landscape designers on call. Next time they come out for lawn maintenance, ask them about your ideas for a new planting bed. You can even let them do the hard work, removing sod, tilling and preparing the bed. Then, you can do the fun part, arranging and planting.
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