The key to enjoying your landscaping year-round isn’t sexy, exciting, or reserved, it’s planning and design structure. In order to be successful in having a four season landscape design, we will need to understand design, color and shape, and how the techniques are applied to create the landscape of your home. How design, color, and shape relate to our desired goal of enjoying your gardens year-round will depend on staggering our flowers, shrubs, and trees so that we can take advantage of their natural life cycle. The goal is to “stagger” our plants so that they bloom in the spring, summer, and as fall arrives, we will have colorful leaf changes and as we transition into winter, we can rely on the shape of the plants to create something beautiful. to watch while everything has died or entered its dormant stage of life.
Starting with spring, we can divide the season into two sections, plants that flower in early and late spring. That way, once the early spring flowers start to drop, the late spring plants will start to bloom in full. Due to this staggered approach, we will need to distribute these plants throughout the entire layout because we don’t want one section to break off while the rest of your gardens sits dormant. If we don’t look at the big picture, we might get lucky and make things look good naturally, but with the right foresight, we can take advantage of the different life cycles to enjoy flowers for as long as possible without the need for new plants. as the season changes.
Once the long days of summer arrive, we won’t see as many flowers as in spring because this is the time to literally enjoy the fruits of our labor. Flower buds turn into fruit and trees fill with the rich green hues we associate with summer vacations. Here we might have fruit trees or flowers and grasses that thrive in the intense heat and the long summer days begin to show their wares.
As the days grow shorter and fall begins to descend on our yards and gardens, we find it hard to find more flowering plants; instead we can focus on the turning of the leaves for our colorful focal point. Now, we can trust trees, ornamental grasses, and shrubs because they are the power players when it comes to leaf-changing beauty. These plants will be our last stand on color we’ll look at this season because we know winter is coming and we’ll finally see what I meant by “Shape” as discussed above.
The leaves will drop and begin to turn into a colorful mess, littering our yards and gardens. The air is no longer filled with sweet-smelling flowers, the scent of freshly cut grass, or the hum of bumblebees that work hard all day. That doesn’t mean we’re lost, though, because we have an ace up our sleeve, just like we choose flowering plants for a staggered bloom cycle and our shrubs and trees for their beautiful color-changing leaves. We also plant some “sleeper” knockouts that only begin to show their gifts AFTER the leaves have fallen.
All we’ll have to look at now are the actual shapes or “skeletons” of the shrubs, trees, and shrubs we planted in the spring. Going back to the Planning part of the process, where the goal was to see into the future and anticipate what the plants would look like in their sterile state, from there using those plants as a focal point for the cooler months. After the snow has fallen (if we’re lucky), we’ll be able to look around our yard and see the beautiful shapes the snow creates on our hibernating lawns, gardens, and patios.
