Designing Your Native Plant Landscape

A Multi-Part Series for the Home Gardener

Step 1- What are you working with?

The wintertime is an odd one for garden aficionados. We desperately miss having our hands in

the dirt, the fresh smell of plants and manure (ok that may be a stretch), and all of the color that

is sorely lacking during the cold months. Once the garden is cleaned up and the temperature

drives us inside, we often find ourselves with little else to do besides thumbing through the

multitudes of seed catalogs and dreaming. I’ve found another winter sport to occupy your time,

and that is Designing your landscape! Now, I am not a professional, but I am in the midst of

planning my own garden and so I want to share the basics of what I have learned. I’ll be writing

about each step to take and posting throughout the months of January and February, which will

give you plenty of time to fiddle with your plan and be ready to go for the spring plant sales!

I’ll begin by stressing that you don’t need to be an expert to be able to design your landscape.

Granted, those who have made this their career have an incredible amount of knowledge and can

help with trouble areas or with hardscaping. This is meant to be a very basic plan for the

homeowner who just feels overwhelmed and doesn’t know where to begin. You also don’t need

any special materials outside of some paper, pencil, colored markers if you so choose, and a

straight edge of some kind.

Let’s begin with assessing what you already have. For this step you will need to get your hands

on a plot survey of your yard. For those who have mortgage documents, there is usually a paper

copy of the plot in with your paperwork (Fig 1). If you don’t have access to that, you can also

use Google Maps, but you’ll have to guess a bit if you have tree cover. I actually prefer Google

Earth, as it has some really fantastic tools for measuring. Even if you don’t have these tools, you

can still draw out your yard boundaries within the confines of your paper, just try to take care to

maintain scale when you add your structures. Take your plot survey and make a few copies or

place a plain sheet of paper over it and trace the outlines. You want to document any existing

structures and any scale markings. You will want to do this tracing a few times. You will have

one BASE layer, and then the additional copies will be your WORKING layers. This step took

me a decent amount of time because I transferred the measurements to a grid paper for my base

layer (Fig 2).

Now that you have your plot drawing, take one of the sheets and a pencil. You are going to want

to add in EVERYTHING that is existing in your yard, good, bad, and ugly. Be viciously honest

with this part! Make sure you draw in walking paths around the yard, downspouts on the house,

problem areas like windy areas or wet spots, low spots, existing trees and their canopy, existing

bushes, shrubs, flower beds. Add in all outdoor utilities like air conditioner units, electrical lines,

fences, as well as where you keep your garbage cans. All of it!! This is not the time to put in

things the way you wish they were, just be honest and add what’s there. You will also want to

mark typical wind direction and sunny vs shade areas. Don’t forget to note compass direction!

This drawing does not need to be super accurate as far as size goes, just approximate. It’s meant

to be a bit messy looking; your goal is to give yourself an accurate starting point for your future

plans. This layer is called your SITE SURVEY.

Take your time with this step, you will want to go outside (I know, I’m sorry) a few times during

different times of day and after weather events so that you can accurately document shade and

sun patterns, wet areas, or other problem zones. Next week we will work on drawing up a Site

Analysis, where you start to add in your wants and needs as well as fix any problems.