While going through my photos recently to write an article on the passing of time in a garden, I found the “before” photos of a garden I had designed a few years back. Even as the designer, it was a lovely surprise to me how far the garden had come in such a short time.
This is what it looked like when I was called in, and just after planting. What tiny, baby plants!
And here’s what those plants look like three years later, with regular care and organic fertilizer to help them be their best:
This is a really fun garden that gets a lot of compliments from folks walking past– the owners wanted a balance between cheerful, bodacious color, and not having to do too much garden maintenance.
We take care of the landscape maintenance once a month, and we spend about 5 hours per month taking care of this garden (there’s a back garden, plenty of blueberries and some dwarf fruit trees, a front garden area around the front walkway and door, and a long strip of flowers and low-maintenance shrubs along the drive).
For such a large area of planting, most gardens with a lot of flowers would require much more care to stay healthy and gorgeous. The key is in both the planning and a quality installation.
I took care in the design phase to specify some real garden workhorses – plants that bloom almost constantly through the growing season but only need minimal care. Then we added some year-round interest by using a few ornamental grasses and plants with colored or interesting foliage, so that even in the depths of winter there is a feeling of motion and beauty in the garden.
Simon Trapkus of Soil Seekers Landscape did the installation from my plans, and as always, it was a pleasure to work with him. I sourced the plants from the appropriate suppliers and put each one in the right place (making any design substitutions as necessary), and Soil Seekers did the soil work, installed edging for easy maintenance, planted all the plants, put in lawn sprinklers and drip irrigation for the beds, hydroseeded a lovely fine-bladed lawn, and applied mulch to the finished project to help the plants stay healthy.
It’s the small touches in the installation which make for easy maintenance – using professional-grade supplies, a careful job in grading/ leveling the soil smoothly, making sure to overlap weed fabric (as was used here) by a foot and bring it up to the edges in just the right way so that it keeps the weeds down effectively, using enough mini bark/ mulch to cover the weed fabric and irrigation lines… Even just using enough pins on the irrigation tubing so that it stays hidden under the mulch and doesn’t shift saves hours of maintenance a year.
These and other small touches in the design and installation phase don’t cost much money, but they make all the difference in making your garden easier to care for.
Since Soil Seekers Landscape and my company, Genevieve Schmidt Landscape Design, both do skilled garden maintenance as well as design and installation, we have the real-world experience to ensure that your garden doesn’t just look good on paper – but that it functions properly and is a pleasure to keep up.
Here are a few more pictures of the front of this garden:
Do you see elements of this garden that you might like? Call us today and see how we can help you create a gorgeous garden suited to your tastes and style.
