Design Ideas for Small Gardens

I'm Bill Elzey with Showplace Lawns. Let's talk a little bit about garden designs for small areas. Plants will change depending on the type of, part of the country that you're in, so that part is hard to put in to a design for you since things will be different. The important things to remember are; is it going to be in full sun, or is it going to be part sun, part shade, or is the area shade all the time? That will determine what type of plants to put in based on the amount of light that they will get. The second thing that you will want to remember is a stair step, or this hump. That relates to your plants. When we're at the back of our garden, we want the tallest plant. As we come forward, we want to go down in height to where your lower plants are at the very beginning, and so as you look at it from the side, you get this kind of stair step. The tallest, the shortest, and graduate up and down. You know, you can go farther than this if you can find that many plants with that varying height. Another way of doing it would be to do it, like put something tall in the center, and something short all the way around it is another good plan to use. Also, when you do this, depending on your space requirements, don't do a boring square like we did for an example. Choose some shapes that have some character to it, and there's a lot more, but different shapes like that will do more to high light the type of plants that you put in your beds. So, keeping in mind the shortest to tallest, or short, tall, short, depending. If you do the short, tall, short, you'd want to do short across the front and up the sides, across the back so to highlight, make that your accenting point. Also, in a short, small garden like that, it's best to stick with just the plants. Mulch your beds, have a good border. A border can be rock, metal edging, or some form of wood. Best to also build it up, so therefore you can control the growing medium by bringing some good soil in. Plant selection based on light, a plant height design, some sort of shape for character, a built up bed with good soil. Good ideas to design a small landscape.