10 Ways to Transform Your Outdoor Space
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Where Great Garden Ideas Come From
Where Great Garden Ideas Come From
Chalk it up to the power of the printed page. All the gardens that flourish around Densey and Ronald Juvonen's Chester County, Pennsylvania, house are of Densey's design, based almost entirely on landscapes she pored over in magazines and books. She clipped and photocopied—assembling file folders marked “stonework” and “color combinations”—and fueled her imaginings with visits to nearby Longwood Gardens. Drawing her plans to scale using graph paper, Densey formulated a unique mix of French and Italian formal landscaping up close to the house, with looser English gardens farther afield. Working in stages and with a talented local mason, Denis Hare, she tamed the open area around her home into a series of beautiful and useful spaces. There are lessons anyone can learn from looking at the stunning results. Feel free to print them out and start a few idea files of your own.
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1. Enhance the Entries
1. Enhance the Entries
Clustering plants along a building's foundation walls and even up the front steps blends a structure into its natural surroundings and makes it more welcoming. Here, a humble potting shed gets the inviting look of an English country cottage, with vine-covered walls and a profusion of flowering plants. Unmatched containers, overflowing with velvety petunias, trailing yellow and white million bells, and a small coleus up top, lend an informal feeling. The rich purplish hues repeated in the container plantings lead the eye—and visitors—right up to the door. Stone pups stand sentry, furnishing the entrance with
an added dose of friendliness.
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2. Sharpen Your Edges
2. Sharpen Your Edges
Well-defined edging not only delineates flower beds and garden borders but also lends a well-cared-for look to any landscape. Here, clean-cut concrete pavers establish a formal border for a grid of four square beds filled with a mix of herbs, vegetables, and flowers. Straight edges like these are especially good for defining and organizing small spaces. Sunk at grade level—and laid on a base of gravel and a setting bed of sand mixed with cement to prevent them from being dislodged by frost heaves—they also allow for easy maintenance, since the lawn mower can roll right over them.
On the outer perimeter, curved lines undulate along the borders, encouraging the eye to pause at each colorful clump of plants that spills out onto the grass. For curved, earthen edges—which have a natural look well suited to large landscaped areas—digging down 5 inches or so with a half-moon edging tool creates crisp lines. Regular upkeep using a string trimmer with its head turned perpendicular to the ground will help keep them that way.
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3. Soften the Hardscape
3. Soften the Hardscape
While big slabs of stone make handsome steps or patio surfacing, left alone they
can look a little…cold. To help rustic stonework blend even better into its natural surroundings—and take the edge off its solid mass—surround it with small-leaved groundcovers such as creeping thyme or this spotted deadnettle. Planted along rock edges, or in the cracks between stones, they add a welcome color contrast, soften hard surfaces, and reinforce any natural curves in a meandering path or in a round or oval patio. The encroaching foliage makes such slabs look even more like natural stone outcroppings.
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6. Layer Beds for a Lush Look
6. Layer Beds for a Lush Look
While using a limited number of colors is a plus in a flower bed, planting in shallow rows that top out at a single height is a major negative. When planning beds, go deep—4 to 5 feet front to back, if possible. Then place plants according to height, with the tallest in back, medium-height plants in the middle, and the shortest ones in front. The effect of this layering approach: a profusion of blooms. Stepping down plants by height also lets you reach back rows more easily for deadheading. And such dense planting helps crowd out any weeds. Here, primary colors of yellow, red, and blue look lively but not riotous thanks to the small size of the yellow and red flower heads and lots of green foliage. Soft blue-green lambs' ears in front provide the third element, and the bonus of fuzzy-leaved texture.
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8. Focus on Foliage as much as Flowers
8. Focus on Foliage as much as Flowers
Blossoms may seem like the star of the garden, but dramatic foliage plants can
be just as effective—and they present opportunities for bold color hard to find
in flowers themselves. The burgundy hues in this multistemmed smoke bush and the coral bells around its base make for a stunning focal-point planting. And whereas blooms come and go during the growing season, these foliage plants will stand as a strong visual anchor from spring to fall. Making the effect doubly striking is the way the forms balance each other: the ball-like clusters of foliage, which sit atop multiple upright stems, are grounded by one low mound of leaves.
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9. Repeat Plants for Balance and Unity
9. Repeat Plants for Balance and Unity
Echoing the same shapes and colors within a landscape gives it a cohesive look. In a formal design, plants are balanced symmetrically; both sides of planted areas are mirror images. In an informal design, balance can be achieved by giving both sides of a garden equal interest and by repeating forms and color values. Here, the arching foliage and yellow trumpets of the daylilies and the soft blue spires of the catmint combine for a dynamic pairing; using the same mix to flank both sides
of the walk gives them equal weight and creates harmony. Their flowing forms also provide a nice counterbalance to the pairs of stiffly clipped evergreens that mark transitions along the path.
All the repetition establishes a rhythm and unifies the garden's design.