Skyland Gardening

16
August
2007

Landscape Planning1

Landscape Planning & Design

Professional landscape designers begin a project, they ask about your Lifestyle and goals. What do you want to do in your garden? Do you spend a lot of time outside the house enjoying your property, or is your yard more of a back-drop for your house? Do you want your pond to beautify the view from inside the house or to dress up your entryway for the pleasure of your guests?

Your time outside is limited to sitting on the patio reading the newspaper or discussing the day’s events with your spouse, a small container garden or independent fountain may be all you need or want to deal with.

Entertainment. If a patio or deck is the focus of your outdoor life and entertainment is your game, water gardens offer great potential as both mood setters and conversation pieces. A small water feature softly bubbling in a corner may be relaxing and stimulate quiet conversa-tion, while a big splashy one may height-en excitement and joviality. Place a raised pond along one side of a deck or even in the middle of it if it won’t impede traffic, and give the pond a wide edge so that you and your friends can sit and watch the fish or admire the plants unique to a water garden. If you have a patio that looks out over a long, narrow garden, you can make the garden look even deeper if you install a long formal pool or place a pond at the far end to create a focal point. Keep the lines of a more remote water feature clean and bold so that the design can speak from a distance.

If you have young children, you may want a pond where they can explore nature for hours. Even shallow ponds pose a safety hazard for toddlers, however. Safer alternatives include a small fountain building in a shallow circle of pebbles or a waterfall that empties into a shallow stream.

Landscaping. If you enjoy puttering in your garden, you can allow a water feature to be as demanding as you like. As with any other part of your landscape, a pond offers endless possibilities for adding plants or rearranging those you already have, plus the added enticement of fish and other pond animals. Or you may make your pond secondary to all of your existing plants. For example, one gardener used a backhoe to dig a half-acre pond as the centerpiece of a collection of unusual trees and shrubs; the beautiful colors and shapes of which are now reflected in the view from his sun-room window.