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Sunset Landscaping Southern Gardens offers step-by-step garden projects and landscape plans that make it easy for Southern homeowners to create gorgeous landscapes. Packed with expert advice from noted Southern garden writers, landscape designers, and experts, this comprehensive gardening book guides readers through the planning processes, the selection of the best plants and building structures. You'll enjoy:
- Year-round expert advice for specific climate zones, designed exclusively for Southern gardeners
- Hundreds of awe-inspiring photographs from the best garden photographers, featuring some of the South's finest gardens and landscapes
- Easy-to-follow guidance and inspiration for every skill level from novice to expert
- Practical step-by-step instructions for simple do-it-yourself landscaping projects and dozens of ready-to-use landscape plans
- An entire chapter with spectacular Southern gardens, from upper and middle South through lower, coastal, and tropical regions
- Botanical index, subject index, climate zones of the south, and much more!
545210 |
Sunset Landscaping Southern Gardens |
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$19.95
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Dimensions - 8-1/4" x 10-3/4"
224 Pages
Softcover
Expert advice for specific climate zones |
Casual Symmetry
Once flanked by foundation shrubs and set on a plain platter of lawn, a 1920s bungalow in Greenville, South Carolina, now boasts a cottage-garden landscape that's perfectly in tune with the home's period charm. But though the effect is relaxed (or even a bit random), an underlying order holds everything together.
Symmetry is the guiding design principle. Sheltered by a stately arbor that repeats the lines of the house eaves, a walkway leads visitors from the gate (painted in warm, welcoming red) to the home's entry. Right-angled pathways of stone and gravel lead through circular planting beds. And within this ordered framework, sumptuous assortments of annuals, perennials, vines, herbs, ornamental grasses, ground covers, and shrubs occupy every square inch of space not covered by paths, delighting the senses with their varying shapes and colors, in a succession of bloom throughout the year.
Lavish though the garden is, it still doesn't have quite enough planting space for its owner, who freely admits she "wants everything." To accommodate that acquisitive urge, containers come to the rescue. Pots of all shapes and sizes fill in whenever the owner needs a mass of green or a spot of seasonal color -- liberally adorning broad steps, decorating other flat surfaces, even nestling into planting beds. And of course, the containers make it possible to rearrange plantings whenever the mood strikes, without having to dig up a single thing.
Evergreen conifers such as hemlock, spruce, and pine...some in the planting beds, some growing in containers...keep the garden looking alive even during the more barren winter months. The backyard includes a terrace typically crowded with potted ground covers, evergreens, cold-tolerant succulents, and cool-weather annuals. They create a cheerful-looking spot for enjoying the outdoors on mild winter days. |
Screens and Hedges
Many homeowners face the dilemma of maintaining the openness of their landscape while preserving their privacy. How do you see out without others seeing in? One solution for screening and privacy is to build a fence or wall. But this can entail considerable initial expense...not to mention maintenance and future repairs. A simpler solution lies in strategic planning of shrubs to block just enough reciprocal vision to give you privacy while maintaining a view. Planted screens do take a few years to fill in completely, but they generally cost far less than constructed screens and create a far softer, more natural appearance.
Shrub screens can be either formal or informal. Sheared hedges represent the formal approach...neat and tidy, for sure, but a type of planting that demands frequent maintenance to retain its flat, wall-like surface. Formal hedges of privet or boxwood are common throughout the South, but you can assume each one gets sheared at least four times every year.
For practical reasons, most gardeners opt for informal screens...shrubs planted inline, as hedging plants are, but left to grow naturally with just the occasional light pruning to control size or head back wildly errant growth. Evergreen shrubs will provide screening throughout the year. Good candidates for informal evergreen screens in the South include glossy abelia, Carolina cherry laurel, Florida leucothoe, holly, Japanese pittosporum, nandina or heavenly bamboo, oleander, and Texas ranger.
A number of deciduous shrubs also form good screens during their leafy part of the year. Among the best of these are doublefile viburnum, forsythia, and winter honeysuckle; even in winter, these will partially block a view with their thick network of bare branches. |
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Specs
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Garden Tip 1
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Garden Tip 2
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