Posts Tagged shrubs

Garden design planning

Good garden design starts with thinking before digging.

Garden design takes time. It’s too late to plan your garden when you are standing in the nursery eyeing every new plant that  tempts you. Spend some time looking at your garden site, either during the off season, when you can really view it  objectively or during the growing season, when your successes and failures make themselves known.

Once you have an idea of how you are going to use your garden, come back to reality and take an objective look at the site  before you come up with your garden design. This is of utmost importance in determining which plants and trees you use to  achieve the desired effect.

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Build a Rain Garden

There’s a new garden in town. It is (mostly) easy to install, looks good year-round, requires almost no maintenance and has a terrifically upbeat impact on the environment. No wonder rain gardens are such a great new gardening trend!

Storm water runoff can be a big problem in summer during heavy thunderstorms. As the water rushes across roofs and driveways, it picks up oil and other pollutants. Municipal storm water treatment plants often can’t handle the deluge of water, and in many locations the untreated water ends up in natural waterways. The EPA estimates as much as 70 percent of the pollution in our streams, rivers, and lakes is carried there by storm water! By taking responsibility for the rainwater that falls on your own roof and driveway, you’ll be helping to protect our rivers, streams and lakes from stormwater pollution.

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A Japanese Garden is Not Your Ordinary Garden

Japanese gardening is much different from the Western style garden.  Most would say that a Japanese garden is far more soul soothing and inspires meditation.  Japanese gardening is a cultural form of gardening that is meant to produce a scene that mimics nature as much as possible.  Using trees, shrubs, rocks, sand, artificial hills, ponds, and flowing water the garden becomes an art form.  The Zen and Shinto traditions are both a large part of Japanese gardening and, because of this; the gardens have a contemplative and reflective state of mind.

The basic methods of scenery in are a reduced scale, symbolization, and borrowed views.  The reduced scale is the art of taking an actual scene from nature, mountains, rivers, trees, and reproducing it on a smaller scale.  Symbolization involves generalization and abstraction.  An example of this would be using white sand to suggest the ocean.  Borrowed views refer to artists that would use something like an ocean or a forest as a background, but it would end up becoming an important part of the scene.

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