Landscape Design: Plant Selection
A Key Factor – Knowing Site Conditions
Knowledgeable plant selection leads to dynamic garden landscape designs. One key decision factor is knowledge of site environment.
Selecting garden landscape plants is probably the most pleasurable feature of garden landscaping. However, plant selection should be the last step in designing landscapes. What factors determine plant selection in the landscape design process?
Here are Five Important Factors to Consider when Choosing Plants:
- Environmental and Site Conditions
- Function andRole
- Maintenance
- Aesthetics
- Cost and Availability
Selection factors connect and interact, similar to parts of a circle or a web. Understanding these factors and paying attention to them during the design process bring rewarding outcomes. Results are landscape plants that grow into healthy, vigorous, and dynamic garden landscape groupings and arrangements.
Folks skilled at choosing plants for landscape designs repeatedly, and often unconsciously, use ways of thinking much like check-off points on a list. However, keep in mind that points on a list are linear. Factors in a garden landscape, in both planning and completed phases, should and will connect and interact .
Environmental and Site Conditions:
These essential parts interact with each other so that every site is unique. Despite similarities among sites, each needs to be observed, measured, and, if possible, monitored.
- Macro (or regional) climates and microclimates influenced by sun and shade differences.
- Plant cold tolerances and heat tolerances represented by Plant Hardiness Zone Maps and local knowledge.
- Soil conditions determined by pH (acidity and alkalinity), composition and texture, organic (carbon) content, nutrient and micronutrient measurements.
- Water accessibility demonstrated by knowledge of what is naturally expected (snow, rain and clean runoff), local reserves in groundwater and natural water bodies, and what is available for irrigation.
This article, Landscape Design: The Role of Plants, and those following are planned so that the five Plant Design Factors and their Divisions form an outline that can be printed and used as a checklist during the landscape design process and plant selection.
©Text and photograph by Georgene A. Bramlage. February 2007. Reproduction without permission prohibited.
