by Lindsay Bond Totten
Scripps Howard News Service
Whether it's just a minor boo-boo--planting Japanese anemone in a sunny location when it prefers shade--or a real doozie--miscalculating how slippery slate can be when wet--gardeners make mistakes.
The learning curve in gardening (as with most worthwhile pursuits) is steep at first, as novices succeed or fail through trial and error. Rules and guidelines are helpful, but they're open to interpretation. Anyway, because gardens are so extraordinarily personal, garden builders are stubbornly inclined to do it their way.
Still, mistakes can be costly. And the bigger it is, in terms of time, money or both, the more difficult an error can be to undo.
Here are several mistakes that gardeners, including myself, seem to spend a lot of time correcting:
Steps that are poorly designed or built: Very few landscape features are as important or practical as steps. It's nice if they are attractive, but first they have to work. Too many gardeners put appearance before function when building steps, discovering later that safety and stability are compromised.
Outdoor steps are designed quite differently than indoor steps. Experts tell us to make risers (the height of each step) lower, and treads (the flat surface on which the foot falls) wider in the landscape than in our homes.
It has to do with spatial relationships, they explain. And while that's undoubtedly true, I just know it works. No gardener I've talked with has ever regretted "over-building" a set of steps. Plenty are sorry, however, for not paying close enough attention to their dynamics and details.
Lack of continuity in the landscape: Collecting "one of everything" may seem like a good plan, until you discover one day that doing so turns your garden into a hodge-podge. In the end, collections of specimen plants rarely add up to good garden design.
Repetition is the key. But it doesn't have to be boring.
Practice by creating "vignettes." Different views from different directions offer opportunities for command performances. Choose a theme for each separate garden scene, select a specimen or focal point, then spend an equal amount of time assembling the support team.
Solid plants that harbor no aspirations of greatness themselves are a good bet. Some of my favorites include boxwood, 'William Penn' barberry, 'Abbottswood' potentilla, Japanese garden and 'Buffalo' junipers, ferns and a pretty little groundcover called Geranium 'Biokovo'.
Outside-in design: Don't make the common error of building your garden for the neighbors. When it comes to garden design, "inside-out" is just plain smart.
From inside your home, locate views that are prominent from key windows. Plan pleasing garden scenes around those views, not solely from a cold perspective. Too often, we plant our gardens based solely on what our neighbors will see, even blocking our own views sometimes with bulky evergreen foundation plants, so that our yards will fit in with others on the street.
Setting an appropriate scale: Weekend gardeners beware. It's easy to make the mistake of digging a bed or starting a small project that can be completed in a weekend. The composite of several such weekends over an equal number of seasons can result in elements that appear somewhat scattered or dysfunctional.
Better to plan a large space on a scale that complements the house and landscape and implement pieces of the whole one weekend at a time.
Cluttering the landscape: Doo-dads and trinkets, masquerading as garden ornaments, are the undoing of many gardeners. Some arrive as gifts, so, of course, we're obligated to find a place to put them. When they start to upstage the plants, it's time to declare a moratorium on knick-knacks.
Try this: Rotate your collection, displaying just one or two pieces at a time. Store the others.
Shearing foundation plants: Or any other plant for that matter, except for formal hedges or topiaries. It takes two or three years of expert pruning to undo a single shearing, so ask yourself before reaching for the electric hedge shears: Do I have the time, skill and patience to correct any mistakes made because I am in a hurry right now? If they're just too large, why not move plants to a better location during the appropriate transplanting season?
Confining plants to a property's perimeter: I call it the "perimeter syndrome"--planting a narrow strip of ground around each building, wall, paved surface and all along the boundary lines. Why squander what may be the most valuable real estate in the whole yard--the wide open space in the middle--to be claimed only by grass? Such a waste.
(Lindsay Bond Totten, a horticulturist, writes about gardening for Scripps Howard News Service.)
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