"Smart Landscape Design" - He's Probably Right

"8 Strategies for a Smart Landscape Design"
Paul McKenzie, Landscaping, HGTV.com

"The traditional view of landscape design is a detailed drawing specifying the location of each shrub and flower bed. In truth, each time you bring home a plant from the nursery you are engaging in the design process, either intentionally or unintentionally.

"Judging from the results I see, there are an awful lot of unintentional designers out there. Many landscapes look like a collection of randomly chosen and haphazardly placed plants. Not only do they lack cohesion, but even worse, the poorly placed plants become liabilities, requiring expensive pest treatments, frequent pruning or complete removal long before they have fulfilled their natural life spans.

"Although an overall plan is a valuable tool, there's nothing wrong with designing on the fly...."

The 'advice' article has some of the sort of design-philosophy content the Lemming expected - which is a good idea, if you're planning to do your own landscaping.

There's also what looks like basic, practical, advice. Like the first item:

"...Plan for equipment access. "It's important to anticipate future access," advises Liz Dean of New Leaf Landscaping in Durham, N.C., "whether it be mowers or stump grinders, or future building projects such as a porch or patio." At some point in the life of your home, you will be faced with a project or repair that requires some loud, monstrous machine to get into your backyard...."

Then the author gets into focal points, formal landscapes, and amoeba-shaped beds. Mr. McKenzie's advice about formal landscapes is: don't. Not unless you've got a really big budget for maintenance. For one thing, if you set up a symmetrical lawn, with matching evergreens, and one dies: you have to replace both, or have a funny-looking yard.

The Lemming's household has a yard that looks lived in. Our landscaping amounts to mowing the grass during summer and shoveling the sidewalk during winter: and that's about it. Obviously, the Lemming isn't an expert on residential landscape design. Not even close.

That said, this article looks like a pretty good, practical, place to start learning about how to set up a yard with relatively few unpleasant surprises.

Somewhat-related posts:

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• "Mercer Island Mansion: Oh My, What a Magnificent Pile"
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• "Civic Park in Los Angeles: Designers, Dozens of Officials and a $56,000,000 Budget"
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• "New York City Rooftops: Individual Taste on the Heights"
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• "Techie Trellises: Really Green Buildings"
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