Don’t Follow Garden Layout Rule #1

Regardless of design training and experience, there is one garden layout practice  applied so frequently that it has become the standard approach used by do-it-yourself gardeners, landscapers, and professional landscape architects, alike. This practice is suggested by many garden centers, design handbooks, rain garden guides, and university extension services.

Today, gardens are so widely designed to include mass plantings — usually odd-numbered groupings of the same type of plant — that this layout technique has effectively become the first rule of garden layout.  Yet, gardens created following Rule #1 fall short on most design factors and can never achieve their full potential.

All designers strive for an attractive garden by selecting and arranging an assortment of plants within garden beds and across the landscape.  Focusing on aesthetics, designers choose suitable plants with a variety of forms, colors, textures, heights, and bloom times. The full potential of the garden is only achieved when specific plants or plant types are repeated, not in groups, but rather distributed throughout the garden.  By spreading out and intermixing those repeated plants, the garden can achieve some advanced goals, such as balance and unity, movement and rhythm.

So why do designers and landscapers rely so heavily on installing trees, shrubs, perennials, annuals, and grasses in groups of identical plants? Mostly because it’s easy and anyone can do it without a lot of supervision. Large spaces can be designed and installed quickly. When that particular group of plants is flowering, the mass of blooms can provide a bright, intense display. But, the rest of the year, those mass  plantings act as just a sea of basic garden filler.

To put it bluntly, mass plantings in a garden are almost always uninspiring, and often just boring.  It’s difficult to create visual interest in a garden layout sorted by plant type. The ability to create a unified garden with both contrast and balance is all but lost.

Instead, try distributing repeated plants across the garden, so that an observer’s eyes are drawn throughout the space, tying everything together. By selecting complementary, repeated plants with different bloom times and seasonal interest, eye movement and garden unity continue for the entire garden year.