Landscape Design

Build a Beer Garden!

Published February 21, 2012 | By Jane

Design your own beer garden to enjoy the summer outdoors

Beer gardens developed in the 19th century in Bavaria. The concept started when cellars were dug into riverbank sides to keep the beer cooled. Trees were planted to add more cooling shade. Before long tables and benches were set up to serve the beer and the outdoor beer garden was born.

These areas became known as beer gardens and taverns in Germany often opened up outdoor areas to incorporate them. The concept is now popular worldwide. If you have a back yard, you can create your own beer garden to enjoy year round.

Start by determining a location that would be convenient to the kitchen so you have easy access to food and dishware. Then look for a flat area that would be good for relaxing and entertaining. You can use a patio or barbecue area that is already in place or create a new area. Use flooring that is easy to clean – patio stone, cement, gravel or decomposed granite, for example. If you have a shady tree available, that might help you decide on placement. Remember shady trees were a basic for the traditional beer garden. If you don’t have handy trees, plant large shrubs and trees around your beer garden space. Or you can also construct a permanent or temporary shade cover instead. Trees are probably a little more historically correct, however!

Rustic wooden outdoor seating in the form of tables, chairs, benches or stools will all help create the ambiance. Try using trestle tables to give that German tavern beer garden effect in your own outdoor room. You can also carry through the theme with half-barrels filled with soil and spilling trailing flowers. Or use whole casks for small tables.

For convenience you could build a wooden frame around a cooler that lets you store ice, beer and other cold materials outside. Then you can hang old beer posters on fences and walls, and place antique signs and decorative German beer steins all around your beer garden to underscore the tavern feel. Serve your beer in thick glassware, metal or ceramic mugs or some collected beer steins.

If you want to use your beer garden to relax in or entertain guests, you could also design in an area with wooden lounge chairs and mount a television set in a well-protected area so you can watch games while indulging in a nice cool beer on the weekends.

And if you want to have a beer party every now and again, you might want to don your traditional German beer drinking hat (complete with feather). Make sure you have plenty of pretzels ready, too, for when you invite your guests.

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Mediterranean landscape design tips

Published February 16, 2012 | By Jane

Here are some tips for ways to design with a Mediterranean theme in your garden.

Choose drought-tolerant Mediterranean type plants like fan palms, rosemary, lavender, bougainvillea, sunflowers, sages and mix them up with some of your favorite native plants to create an easy care, eco-friendly garden with a European flair. If you want to save water and have an eye-catching landscape, a Mediterranean garden is a perfect way to replace your lawn.

Design in areas that create the feel of the Mediterranean locale you want to create, like Tuscany, Greece, a Roman look, a Spanish design or another Mediterranean feel and blend them with the layout of your own property.

Incorporate hardscape features that will define your landscape. Consider using stucco arches, sculptures of classical statues, lion head fountains, stone stairways, trellises covered with climbing vines and other characteristic elements that create the look of a Mediterranean garden.

Use décor. Containers in sunny colors or terracotta that paint an Old World picture, brightly flowered fabrics for cushions, or wrought iron trellises are just some choices that will set the mood.

Put together the elements of permanent features, décor and plants and you can create your own Mediterranean vacation-land without having to leave home. Add some of these tips for Mediterranean landscape design to the basics of your space and blend them so they flow with the layout of your own property. You can make an effective Mediterranean garden and keep your costs down by incorporating any existing structures, rocks, trees or other major features that would be expensive to change. A good designer can help you make the most out of any shape or contour of land. Using a theme like a Mediterranean garden can help you disguise unwanted views and add wow to the rest of your landscape. By mixing in native plantings you can make this style of garden easy to maintain and eco-friendly as well as beautiful.

Posted in Articles on Landscape Design | Tagged Jane Gates, Landscape Design, Mediterranean garden, Mediterranean landscape design, Mediterranean plants | 2 Comments

Why landscape design?

Published February 13, 2012 | By Jane

In this housing-driven recession, many people are still holding on to their purse strings tightly. Some folks are facing hard times with lost jobs, other income losses and the rising prices of essentials. Even those who are less burdened are uncomfortable with spending money in such insecure times. However, most studies are showing the recession to be either holding steady or showing signs of recovery. Still, most of us are being held frozen in the thrall of fear.

Historically, this is the time when many folks make the best investments. Costs are likely to rise as the economy recovers and materials and services find an increased demand. Although it is understandable that fear keeps many of us from buying anything beyond survival necessities, we need to look at the fact that life is now and quality of life still matters — even during tough economic times.

I would never suggest spending money frivolously or beyond what you can afford. But I do believe that fear can sometimes do more damage than good. If housing prices have pretty much bottomed out — even if they don’t start to rise for a long time — our living spaces are still responsible for maintaining good health, security and much of the comfort in our daily lives. Investing in our homes is always a good idea when it comes to maintaining both house value and a balanced lifestyle.

Landscape design may appear to be low on the priority list of housing expenses, but think about it. Yes, being a landscape designer I am admittedly prejudiced on the subject. But facts are still facts.

The condition of your property affects the health of your home and that of your family. Bad landscaping can cause flooding, damp walls and black mold, foundation damage (from invading tree roots or water damage), disasters from falling trees or fire promotion, rats and other dangerous pest invasions, and much more. These conditions not only reduce the value of your property but can make you and your family sick!

Good landscaping can save you money by saving on utility bills. A good designer will plant your property to mediate housing temperatures using sun and shade exposure. You can even design in the kind of landscape that will help collect or save water and electricity.

Design isn’t just for expensive, showy gardens. A good designer will extend the living space of your home so you can use and enjoy your outdoor space as an extension of your habitable square footage. You can create fancy or inexpensive outdoor rooms, sports areas, work areas or grow your own food with an herb garden, vegetable garden or fruit trees. You could even incorporate some yard space for a hobby that will earn you extra income.

Then there is the huge payback of having a well-designed garden. Your landscape design can allow you to replace expensive vacation travel with a home vacation in your own backyard. You can soothe away health-damaging stress with the trickle of water from a fountain or water garden. Sometimes, just having a place of your own to get away from it all and be with nature for a few minutes during the day will offer the value of an expensive therapy session. Think about money saved and delight created by clipping off your own fresh cut flowers, or cooking up organic vegetables picked ripe only a few steps beyond your back door.

No, landscape design is not just for the rich. But it can make your life richer. Even in an economic recession like this one!

Posted in Articles on Landscape Design | Tagged designing outdoors, garden design, Landscape Design, practical garden, recession garden | Leave a comment

How to Design a DIY Landscape Plan

Published February 5, 2012 | By Jane

One of the most common mistakes in landscaping is failing to put a plan on paper before building the garden. A plan doesn’t have to be fancy or expensive. In fact, you can design a DIY landscape plan by yourself. Here are some guidelines.

Start by making a list of the items you want in your landscape. Note lawn areas, planters and special features like a patio, barbecue area, swimming pool or hot tub, paths and more.

Sketch out your design on paper. You can even do it on a napkin, but you will get more accuracy if you use grid paper. Wander around your property and record your property lines and where all the major features are located. You can do this as a rough drawing or do measurements. The more accurate you measure, the more reliable and detailed your drawing can be.

Then draw in the hardscape — permanent, non-living features — that will be built. Keep in mind practicalities: utility lines, accessibility, land stability, etc. as well as where these features will look best in the layout of the design.

Follow with the trees. Check with a compass to see how the shade will move so you locate trees where they will be most effective. Shading your house in the heat of summer can save you ten percent on your air conditioning bills.

Add the largest areas for planting like lawns or large gardens and work your way to the smaller details.

If you want a more accurate drawing, you might want to transfer these notes to a landscape design software program. Or you can keep them on paper.

Once you have the basics laid out you can start playing with moving things around. It will be much cheaper to use an eraser or a delete key to test out different design ideas than risk making a mistake in the installation and have to rip everything out later.

If you want a second opinion on your DIY landscape plan, call in some professional help — a garden designer or architect — for a consultation. It may be worth the expense to get some ideas you might not have thought of or to catch a design idea that might turn out to be a problem later down the line.

Start with a well-thought- out DIY landscape plan and you have taken the biggest step to ensure you’ll have a successful landscape.

Posted in Articles on Gardening | Tagged DIY garden, DIY landscape, do-it-yourself garden plans, garden plans, Landscape Design | Leave a comment

What is a Beautiful Landscape?

Published February 4, 2012 | By Jane

What is a Beautiful Landscape?

“A beautiful landscape” can mean many different things to different people.For some, the only landscapes that will qualify require hundreds of thousands of dollars in elaborate construction.For others, the most beautiful landscape is the one nature created – with no sign of human intervention.For most, the concept is somewhere in between.

If you are building a landscape for your home – or for any building, the best choice is something that will not conflict with the design of the structure or that of the general surrounding area.A lake of emerald green grass surrounding an adobe styled house or pouring down the side of a scrub-textured chaparral creates visual discord.A wild English garden surrounding a formal building looses its charm and merely appears unkempt.A formal geometrical garden would look absurd surrounding a log cabin.This does not mean you can’t have a garden styled to your taste even if the house style you bought isn’t.It does mean that to make both beautiful, some thought has to go into making idea, taste and reality mesh.

You can create illusion of landscape styles even if you don’t have enough space or money to re-create you ideal.A “Beverly Hills” mansion landscape feel can be designed on a shoestring budget by creating miniature areas as focal points.

Do-it-yourself folks can save a lot of money.But since most people don’t have the knowledge or experience of professionals, it’s not a bad idea to spend considerable time doing research, or call in consultants for advice before diving into landscaping projects.Research and creative time is spent by the best professional landscape designers and architects.It does account for much of their billable time.Ideas do not pop into a creative’s head and drop onto the paper instantaneously.Also make sure you hire the right help for the right kind of expertise you need.

With the ‘globalizing’ of communications, generic plans have become popular and practical.Adapting a small number of basic designs to different layouts and plant environmental needs has created a whole industry that gives what appears to be a custom design at a less expensive price.If you are creating your own design, you need to allow yourself that time for thinking and researching.Then comes the adaptation of those ideas to the page format so you can delegate whatever you need to or work on the plan over time without forgetting important aspects.

Another point to consider about beauty, is that not everyone thinks the same plants are beautiful.I find some folks like a neat, contained plant to be beautiful whereas someone else finds the same look too stodgy and prefers a natural sprawl or wilder look.Colors are very personal.We probably start associating our feelings with different colors as early as in our pre-verbal childhood.Maybe we physically see colors differently depending on how our organic eyes and brains process the light waves.Who knows why we often prefer one color over another.And I don’t suppose it matters.But some people feel quite strongly in favor or against various flower or leaf colors.

Posted in Articles on Landscape Design | Tagged beautiful garden, beautiful landscape, garden beauty, garden design, Landscape Design | Leave a comment

Designing a garden focal point

Published January 30, 2012 | By Jane

To create a successful landscape you need to design a focal point into the layout of your garden. All you need to do is create one event that catches the eye first when you look at the garden area. A focal point is essential to a good design whether you are designing a room, painting a piece of artwork or creating a landscape. The purpose of a focal point is to give the eye something exciting to enjoy, to keep the view from becoming dull and boring.

You can create more than one focal point, but consider secondary focal points to be supports for your main event. Don’t add competing focal points that take away from the main feature and confuse the composition. Consider points of interest that are less riveting than your main focal point to be like supporting roles in a play. They help build the overall story and support the main event. Focal points can be living or not, a single object or a grouping. You can use rocks and boulders, constructs or sculptures, fountains or logs. Focal points can underscore a theme, like a carved tree-trunk bench in a woodland garden), an unusual banana specimen plant in a tropical garden or a wagon wheel in a rustic Western landscape. Consider a showy seating area with unusually shaped, colored or styled furniture as a focal point.

Lead up to your focal point with paths, garden beds, fencing or decorative border materials. Add an archway or an unexpected gateway to a fence and that can become a focal point in itself.

Creating a focal point can one of the more fun parts of designing the landscape. You can use a favorite item, search through garden centers, check out your attic, garage or wander through a junk yard and find a creative way to recycle some object into a focal point. Or you can plant an exciting area with some really showy specimen plants to create drama in your garden design. Designing a garden focal point can not only be a fascinating project, but it can make a bland landscape beautiful.

Posted in Articles on Gardening, Articles on Landscape Design | Tagged design event, focal point, garden focal point, Jane Gates, Landscape Design, landscape focal point | 1 Comment

Art in the garden and the garden as art

Published January 17, 2012 | By Jane

Richie Steffen, expert on integrating art in the landscape offered a lecture at the recent Pacific Horticulture Symposium in Pasadena, California that reminded all of us just how the garden can contain art or become a piece of art itself. In the desperate pursuit of fame and fortune encouraged by our consumer society so many of the finer aspects of our culture and life are falling by the wayside. The arts and those aspects of human creativity that are being displaced by the need for material acquisition are leaving people with a growing need for something more than physical comforts to nourish the heart and soul. You can create your own home retreat to lift your spirits and put back the missing creativity in your life by making your garden a place of art. Whether you add art to your garden with murals, statues, décor, ornamental surfaces or make your garden into art with creative structures or design with plants. Steve encourages us all to look at the garden as not only a place to entertain or to use for practical applications like pets, growing edibles and play, but as a place to have fun, add healing, therapy and joy to daily life. Enjoying art in the garden and the garden as art can make your landscape into a very important part of your life.

Posted in Articles on Gardening, Articles on Landscape Design, Garden videos, news and reviews | Tagged art in garden, garden as art, Jane Gates, Landscape Design, Richie Steffen | 1 Comment

Design a DIY Landscape

Published January 16, 2012 | By Jane

The most common mistake in gardening is failing to plan out a garden first. Even if you just scribble out your ideas on paper, you will be doing yourself an enormous favor. The more detailed and accurate your plan, the more money, frustration and regrets you will save yourself. You can call in an expert designer for the more complicated plans or even to coach you with your own design. Or you can design a DIY landscape plan for yourself.

The reason you want to start on paper is so you can see how things will flow together. Designing on paper gives you a chance to test out different ideas. It is much easier to change things with a delete key on the computer or a pencil eraser – and cheaper than having to make changes with heavy labor and expensive materials in the garden itself.

Start out by making a list of all the things you want in your DIY garden. Think of how you will be using your space: for exercise, pets, entertainment, growing edibles, relaxing etc. Then add appropriate items to your list like patios, swimming pools, lawns, pens, barbecues, raised vegetable gardens, water features, seating areas, driveways and patios and so on.

Sketch out how all these areas will work along with each other to form a useful yet decorative flow. Use walkways and paths to link events together. Remember safety and design areas like swimming pools and child play areas where they can be observed from the house. Place edible gardens like herb gardens and vegetables where they will be convenient to the kitchen. Designing wisely can then be made artistic and picturesque.

As you lay out a DIY plan place the permanent features – the hardscape – first. Also make sure you sketch out the important systems like drainage, irrigation and utility lines like electric and gas. Make sure you make provisions for future expansion – utility lines that can be capped but will be available for future use.

Once your overall design, hardscape and systems are in place, you can then start designing the living part of your design or the softscape. Start with the largest features; the trees. Plant the right kind of tree in the right location so it will fit properly when mature, the roots will not interrupt any of your hardscape as the tree grows. Consider the sun at different times of the year and plan shade from your tree so it enhances your garden. Then move on to specking out the different kinds of plants you will use. Always plan for the mature size. (You can always fill in with smaller plants and annuals while the newly-planted are too small to fill their space.)

The final part of you plan can involve adding final details like décor, supplementary plant lists, edging materials and other practical and decorative elements. Do plenty of research. The more you know about design and the elements you include, the better your design will be. Like any do-it-yourself project the success of your project is directly proportional to the wisdom with which it is pot together. And one of the wisest things you can do in a DIY landscape design is a plan.

Posted in Articles on Gardening, Articles on Landscape Design | Tagged garden design, garden plan, Landscape Design, landscape plant, plant a garden | Leave a comment

Landscaping around the swimming pool, part one

Published January 8, 2012 | By Jane

Up until the last couple of decades every swimming pool was built in some form of rectangular shape and painted with bright blue. The only design variations remained with the choice of tile, and even then there wasn’t a lot of creativity available for the average home owner. Now swimming pool styles are limited only by the imagination of the designer. Swimming pools offer not only summer cooling, fun and exercise, but they can become the focal point for a beautiful landscape. What you plant around your pool can add or subtract from the overall effect. You can destroy the success of even the most lovely pool by landscaping with the wrong plants – plants that can ruin the design or even cause severe damage to the structure of the pool itself.

Keep the water of your swimming pool clean. That means you need to avoid litter from shedding greenery. Evergreen plants and trees will minimize leaf drop into the swimming pool. Enthusiastically flowering plants will also create heavy petal drop. Most pool vacuums can handle a light dusting of organic litter, but a build up of leaves, petals and berries can choke up even good systems. Be particularly careful about pine trees that dump thick layers of pine needles. Don’t give these trees a home near your pool.

Mulching gardens around the swimming pool will both keep dust and dirt in place and add a decorative effect. Choose a material that will compliment the design of your pool. Stone or gravel is a practical choice. It is less likely to blow or wash into the water like tree bark. Pea gravel is softer on the feet and easier to dig through, but it can kick loose and end up on the pavement or in the pool. If you want to use gravel, consider the rounded stones of river-rock for a neat, formal look or a Japanese design. Or look for ¾ inch gravel that comes in decorative colors and stays in place better than pea gravel. A layer of weed block set under mulch or rock will discourage weeds and keep your design in place longer.

Any trees planted near a swimming pool must be chosen carefully. If the amount of litter from bark, leaves, needles, flowers or seeds is important, it comes second to the damage roots can cause. Larger trees can put out roots that can crack through even heavy layers of cement. Some trees are known for their damaging surface roots, like the Mulberry, Sycamore, Magnolia and Poplar. For poolside, choose smaller trees with well behaved root systems or make sure the trees are planted with root barriers and placed a reasonable distance from concrete structures. Avoid trees that drop fruits and berries that will stain pavements. And to plant the right tree in the right location you need to find out the mature size of the tree. The cutest young tree can turn into a monster in a remarkably short time.

More information is available in ‘Landscaping around the swimming pool, part two’.

Posted in Articles on Landscape Design | Tagged Landscape Design, plant swimming pool, pool garden, swimming pool design | Leave a comment

Olive Tree Information (Olea europaea)

Published January 8, 2012 | By Jane

Plant profiles: Olive trees

Olive trees are one of the most attractive trees to use in a Mediterranean, Southwestern, or romantic styled landscape designs. Native to the eastern parts of the Mediterranean, Asia and Africa, the olive tree can grow into a small to medium sized tree usually topping out between twenty five to fifty feet tall and often wider than high. Young olive trees can be single or multi-stemmed and quite graceful. The multi-stemmed trees tend to grow shorter than single trunks. As they age they can acquire gnarled, sculptural branches that give them character. These handsome trees are evergreen so they will offer shade year round. Olives are ideal for drought-tolerant gardening and are low maintenance trees.

The fruit can be a problem. For people who enjoy processing olives for eating – they are very bitter and can be slightly toxic if eaten raw – the fruits can be a a fun project to cure and preserve. For landscapes where the goal is purely aesthetic the fruits can become a nuisance, littering the ground and staining concrete surfaces. There are several kinds of olive trees that would be better selections to use for landscaping where the fruit is not desirable.

The Olea europea ‘Majestic Beauty’ with its small, inconspicuous fruit is a good choice for an attractive olive tree without the mess. More expensive to purchase is the Swan Hill Olive^®of Olea. This olive does not produce fruit and, although it is a little more costly since the variety is still under patent, it is a lovely tree that will give you years of easy-care beauty. The Olea ‘Wilsonii’ is another good fruitless choice olive tree. All these are ideal for lovely and practical landscape use. Some people are allergic to the pollen from olive trees. This would be another reason to select one of these non-fruiting varieties.

The olive tree is an evergreen native to warm, sunny climates. It thrives in dry summers and well-drained, calcareous (lime rich) soil. Where happy it will eventually grow into a handsome shade tree or create an attractive backdrop for other plants. Fruitless varieties are also good choices for designing near water features like ponds or swimming pools. It is one of the best shade trees to plant for evergreen performance in areas of poor soils, hot sun and low rainfall.