Planning a Makeover

Before you undertake a big landscape design project, consider what you're asking for. It's easy to walk behind a lawnmower. It's much harder to get on your knees and pull weeds out of the flower bed, or haul endless loads of mulch in your wheelbarrow. Before you undertake a big landscape project, you'd best learn what it means to be a gardener.

And while the best gardening instruction — even a master gardener course — may give you lots of tips and ideas and inspiration, it won't teach you to garden. A flower bed will teach you how to garden. It will teach you about soil compaction and insects and fungi and tough perennial weeds with tubers and taproots. It will also teach you about color and texture and plant adaptation and tiny beautiful insects you'd never noticed before.

Decisions about your landscape should not be rushed. It may take a couple of cycles of the seasons to learn the nuances of the place you live. If you can't immediately point north from anywhere in your home or yard, you're not ready.

Is landscape design within the realm of the do-it-yourselfer? As someone who is both an avid do-it-yourselfer and trainer of master gardeners, I can only say that I would hesitate to take on more than the most basic design project. It's easy to draw shrub-shaped blobs on a sheet of graph paper. But a garden is not something that fits easily into grids and charts. Paper normally only captures two dimensions (width and depth). A good landscape design will also consider height, changes through the season and changes over the years.

Landscape design software may make the job easier, but don't expect it to make you an instant expert, even if you're a computer whiz. While a computer may be able to beat the world’s best chess player, for landscape design I'll put my money on a flesh-and-blood expert.

If you are seduced by the glamour of design software (and gardeners are easily seduced), consider this while shopping. The ideal software will be reasonably priced and allow you to do the following: import a photo of your house so you can see how the design connects to your home’s architecture; access a plant database with pictures and detailed descriptions; search the database by flower color, time of bloom, size, exposure, regional adaptation, shape and texture; view the landscape from any angle in three dimensions; and see how the landscape changes through the seasons and the years. When you find it, let me know.