The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation, and Maintenance
by Cass Turnbull

MAP & HARDSCAPE
Now that you know what makes a yard look good or bad, you can start improving or redesigning yours. The first thing you need to do is to make a to-scale map of your yard and house. Don't skip this part--you can see things on paper you can't see looking outside. I discovered by staring at my map that I was wasting a third of my yard potential in a long grass driveway past my house to my garage. I kept trying to think of skinny plants for either side. Rather limiting. By looking at the map, I decided to make the driveway come in from the alley in back (and then my husband moved the walls of the garage end to end) and turned that old driveway space into a side garden with a winding green path. Now it's the nicest part of the yard.

A typical yard, perhaps the one you've just bought.

Mapping Your Yard
Anyway, on a big double or quadruple piece of graph paper, map out your house and yard. Figure out how long your stride is and pace off the footage to one corner of your house, then pace off everything else. Draw in all permanent structures maybe with pen, try out new designs in pencil. But beware: you may find that you need to move the "permanent" garden shed or cut down the tree. It's a good thing to put in overhead wires and underground utilities, too. And be sure to put in North.

(See a finished map here.)

With a black or colored pencil, put in the features you're pretty sure you want to save. The temptation is either to keep all those big old trees because trees are sacred, or, alternately, to take out everything because you're tired of the whole mess. But consider carefully. You will be spending a fortune on tiny shrubs that will take a long time to amount to anything. Saving that old camellia or lilac may give much needed height and weight to your new yard. Also many old shrubs can look amazingly good when cleaned up by an experienced pruner.

Leave out existing concrete paths and present shrub bed lines on your map. This will be a great help to you in being creative. With the sweep of a pencil you can change your shrubs, change the shape of beds, or add a giant tree. Try an outer ring perimeter of trees and shrubs and an inner ring of beds around your house. Try a mounded island bed in the middle with a path around the outside and beds on the perimeter. Try dividing things into the different spaces (the rooms) separated from each other by shrub beds, or hedges or fences. The shrub bed-lawn shapes on your map should resemble jigsaw puzzle pieces, with the grass and beds of about equal size. The peanut is a shape much emulated by garden designers. It may help to draw in a nice shape for the lawn area first. What is left over is the bed space. Then you continue designing to fill in the empty beds.

Remember to leave truck or wheelbarrow access (no steps) to all areas. People who are really creative get see-through paper at the local art store. On one they put the circles of the plants they will see in the winter, mostly evergreens. On top of that they overlay a sheet of colored circles representing spring color, and again one for fall color. Get as detailed or as simple as you like. Use your Copy Mart to make copies of your map to doodle on.

(See a finished design here.)

Using Your Map
Your map will also help you to avoid overplanting. When you draw in your shrubs and trees (as circles) draw them in full grown size or width, then purchase just that many plants. Look up the mature height and figure that it will be about as wide as it is tall, if a shrub. Many trees and some shrubs will, of course, be tall and thin. Be sure to map their mature width. When you go to plant them spaced for their adult size, they will look too far apart--vulnerable-- dumb, in fact. Do it anyway. Avoid the number one fault of new landscapes: overplanting. If you make everything look finished now, you will regret it later. In almost no time (have you noticed how fast time is going?) they will crowd each other and you will have to (1) cut out those expensive shrubs it seems you just bought, or (2) they will run into each other and look crowded and choked. We will talk more later about ameliorating new landscape owners' shock syndrome (NLOSS). Color the circles of same types of plants the same color, connect them with a line and then take the line to the side where you can name the plant. You need not know what exact plants you want where. Just picture something, say, "about ten feet, evergreen, columnar-- there," and draw it in. Or "a group of five small mounded shrubs, there--with a focal point at the edge." Later we will do a plant search to name that circle.

The map is good because it starts you out with a good hardscape. It forces you to look at the basic shapes of things: your walkways, paths, your patio, the vistas, the shapes of shrub beds. Also, plug in the focal points, one per area. Note also where your main view windows are. The most important view is usually the one from the kitchen sink window. If you have a bathroom with a window, it often comes in second in view importance.

Be sure to draw your beds three times as big as you think you'll need them; you can't have a bed too big. It will be burgeoning and billowing with wonderful things, getting bigger all the time. I have the hardest time convincing people to make their beds big enough. Even if you show them a full grown forsythia and then stand on the spot where you want to plant three--they can't seem to visualize a bed big enough to hold them. Empty bed space must be scary to people. To me it's just wonderful opportunity.

Planning To Use Your Space
To assist you in your planning, you may wish to lay hoses or ropes out on the grass where you want your beds to be. Move them around until they look right. Imagine them planted with full-sized plants. Spend some time looking out your windows, imagining what you'd like to see. Visualize. Visualize. Visualize. You may also wish to get copies of your "before" pictures. Don't forget to take these pictures. Especially take pictures of "nothing" areas. Later they will look great and you will want to remember how dull and empty it was there before. My local Copy Mart can take three or four series pictures and blow them up on one big sheet--even in color. Draw on them to get an idea of how a tree or a group of shrubs would look in various places.

Consider the style that is appropriate for your house, but don't be trapped by it. I thought that because my house was in a square, flat, crowded neighborhood, I should have square flat beds. Wrong. The beds all curve and are built-up as mounds. For contrast I have the flat green lawn. It works. But it would have been inappropriate in such a small lot to put in a formal yard with lots of topiary and urns and statues and rose beds. There is just not the room. It really doesn't match the neighborhood. And even though I love those pictures of English perennial borders, the flowers all die back to ugly dead twigs in the winter and in the summer they are very high maintenance. So I made only the tiny one in back.

Draw in big beds next to your house; people do not have need to walk right next to the house where those old concrete paths are. They will enjoy walking around a nice curved bed full of fun things. Concrete paths can be pretty easy to remove. When I tackled mine, I was amazed. I had one that went straight back from my back door to an old shed's foundation. I broke it up one afternoon with a sledgehammer and carted the pieces off to one side. I used the broken concrete as stepping stones arranged in a curve to the side garage door, the curve complementing a shrub bed curve nearby.

NLOSS - New Landscape Owner's Shock Syndrome
Speaking of your hardscape and NLOSS (new landscape owner's shock syndrome), you should seriously consider GRADE CHANGE and ROCK WORK for your yard. I wish that I had built my beds up twice as high as I did (they were up about eight inches but they've sunk). Try having terraces or mounds (but never too steep; you will find them hard to mow, and, furthermore, they will encourage erosion). Constructing these or inter-locking retaining walls adds interest by making a contrast in height. You can create the same effect by waiting for all your tall things to grow tall, your medium to medium, and your small ones to get established just as they are. But we are so impatient as to want things to look good now. Incorporating height into our gardens with raised beds will help alleviate new landscape owner's shock syndrome. This syndrome commonly occurs when the homeowner spends about three times as much as she or he figured it should cost at the most--and looking outside sees all these incredibly small, widely spaced shrubs for his or her money. The final cure for NLOSS is, you guessed it, patience. You may wish to interplant widely spaced shrubs with easy seeded annual flowers, ferns, or groundcovers. They may help ease the sense of emptiness until your babies grow.

Consider Rocks
Another thing you should consider for your hardscape is the addition of some tasteful big rocks, arranged either in the Japanese style or as a natural rocky outcropping. In the winter your view will be of these rocks and whatever is evergreen in your yard. They do a lot to relieve NLOSS. In Japan there are people who professionally pick rocks; they listen to them; to the Japanese, rocks can stand for certain values. A very pleasing aspect in a yard is a rock which mirrors "the movement" of a plant or plants. Also rocks can counterbalance a leaning tree or can be nestled into a ground cover like an egg in a nest. Bury your rock halfway in the ground to give it a natural look. Always place rocks in groups of mixed sizes. Consider rocks. You can wait years to add trees and shrubs to your landscape, and you can change things around if you don't like them, but it's very hard to go back and add walls, paths, good soil, or big rocks once things get under way. Instead of poured concrete patios (so ugly) and wood decks (they get wet and rot out and become slippery in wet climates) consider flagstones and aggregate concrete bordered by bricks. Stepping stones of any sort are nice, too.

Bad rock work. The rocks are all the same size and evenly sized.
Good rock work. Use rocks in groupings. For a natural look, bury them halfway.

Bad rockwork looks as if some giant just plunked down a rock every so often. Good rockwork is art. Dry or wet stream beds can be done poorly or done well, as with all rock work. A good stream bed is dug out and will vary in width and depth. It curves and has large placed rocks as well as small ones. Bad dry stream beds look as if a truck full of same-sized rock pulled up, lifted the bed, and drove off.

With your hardscape map you should note traffic paths and views from windows. And don't forget the dictates of family needs. Should there be room for a play area? A dog run? A vegetable patch? I still have my map; the lines remain the same but the names of plants have changed. As a phytophile, I've had to rotate in new rare and wonderful plants and give away last year's favorites. It's how I avoid "fruit salad."

SUMMARY
- Make a to-scale map.
- Put in North, overhead and underground utilities, windows and permanent structures.
- Take before photos.
- Have Copy Mart make copies of photos and map to draw on.
- Use ropes or hoses to try out shrub bed lines.
- Pay special attention to window views, make them interesting, do not block windows with evergreens.
- Blend style with neighborhood.
- Raised or mounded beds, and good rockwork make landscapes look good while you wait for the garden to mature (alleviating NLOSS).
- Avoid designing with shrubs spaced too closely together.

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