Vinny,

I'm not particularly good at this kind of design, but have gardened for a long time. Remember too that I am two full zones colder than you, which means a shorter season & slower overall growth. Here are some ideas for you.

Your design looks a lot like my designs often do when I start. It is a bit too linear. Gardens usually look better with irregular patterns. Think swirls or interlocking paisley patterns or triangles or irregular roundish blocks, not lines of plants.

The first thing I would do is add a few stepping stones into the bed so you can work in the bed. Since it is only 8 feet wide you won't need much, but you will need something, especially with the back side blocked by the grasses.

I would plan on two paths slanted into the bed, each started at about 8-9 feet from each side of the front edge toward the center then out toward the back to the outside, sort of a squished "X" shape. All you need to do is drop in a few stepping stones about 3 feet apart, here and there so that you can take a long stride from one spot to another without crushing stuff. I start the first stone about one long stride into the bed and leave a small open spot between clumps of plants so I can get to the first stone. You could also make a lazy "S" pattern through the bed from short side to the other, if you have access on both sides of your garden. My paths are not really visible to garden visitors.

The groundcover sedums will do fine all across the front, but I would still stagger them in and out a bit. If your six circles mean six plants that will make a very patchy groundcover however for 25 feet. Think about a foot round of coverage for each plant the first year or two, maybe more in zone 7, but six plants isn't much for a groundcover start. Second you probably need some lowish plants along the two short sides as well. I would probably add another tallish sedum to the sides, something like Autumn Joy, Matrona, or Maestro (a favorite of mine and sport of Matrona).

I would move the monarda more towards the center. At 3-4 foot tall they will look awkward on the outside edges. Also their foliage may be unattractive (mildew) by bloom time and they often need to be cut to the ground after bloom. (They will regrow clean shortish foliage). Maybe each clump a third of the way to the inside.

I would also move the one clump of bulbs on the left to the inside of the bed, so the foliage won't show on the outside of the bed. Since the bulbs are the first things to show in the bed and will be hidden by perennial foliage later in the season, it doesn't much matter where they are, but here I would tend to make them evenly spaced, since they are the only thing showing when they bloom. Also I think they need to be back a bit further in the bed, since the short sedum won't hide the dying foliage at all.

Each of your Walker's Low will probably get about 3 feet wide each way, probably in its first season and 18 inches to 2 feet or more in height. Mine make about 2 and a half feet wide in their first season in zone 5. My oldest are slightly larger than 3 by 3 by 2 and a half feet tall, although I have one catmint that got even bigger. They also get cut into 9 inch balls once in mid-season, probably twice in your climate. So anyway, you have a lot of room along a 25 foot border for catmints, so you'll have to add more or clump them into a "V" shape, or interplant the three with the monarda or boltonia clumps, or perhaps the bulbs, or have big holes.

The gaillardas, OTOH, are smallish plants that do not take up a lot of footprint in the garden. The flowers tend to be on comparatively longish stems, to what they look like on the bottom. They probably grow thicker where you are, and again I wasn't sure if you were planning on 4 plants or 4 clumps of plants. If only 4 plants I would use three together and the extra one somewhere else. If you want them spread throughout the bed I would plan on a dozen or more plants spread through a 25 foot long space, either in clumps or one big patch, in order to have impact.

Your mums seem to take up a fairly large part of your garden. Since you have longish fall, that's probably a good idea. I would tend to plant them all in a nice big clump, especially if they are all one color and make sure the color doesn't clash with the long-blooming gaillardias.

I would also tend to move the Boltonia in behind the mums, as they are too tall for the outside side edges of the bed and they also will sometimes sprawl out of the beds in their present location and add to a spotty look. I'd use a small low hoop on the boltonias to hold them more upright.

I like the idea of the white liatris because it echoes the upright grasses, but I think that you also need at least one early season bloomer in the bed, to bloom after the bulbs and before the grasses and late perennials get going. Foxgloves would certainly be nice, but I have trouble keeping the biennial ones going in my garden, and they also seem to plant themselves wherever they like. :~)The smaller perennial foxglove, D. grandiflora (pale yellow) might work for you, but it doesn't give me a long bloomtime. Personally I'd add several shrub roses to the bed. I love grasses and roses together and the roses will bloom from May-June to fall if you pick the right ones.

I am by no means an expert, but I have a degree in graphic design as well as art and the more I learn about garden design, the more I see that the principles of basic design are more or less universal.

I think Leslie gives great advice. I like your plant choices, but putting plants in rows -even modified rows- isn't going to turn any heads. Leslie's advice to "think paisley" is excellent.

I grow galliarda, and it's true... they are not mound-shaped. More like a tallish cylinder that you can tuck here and there to add the flash of yellow and/or red. Even planting several together, in my garden, creates a haphazard tangle rather than a mound.

Come to think of it, to me, the red of the monarda paired with the lavendar of the nepeta might not be a match made in heaven. That's only my opinion - best to please yourself when it comes to combining colors because it's purely subjective.

I can see you've done a lot of work prepping the bed and probably don't want to do any more, but I think that the prettiest beds have organic, irregular shapes. It might be nice if, sometime in the future, you took a garden hose and outlined some beautiful undulating curves along the edge.

Keep in mind that most islands will be viewed from several angles, so you need to place some well-shaped plants with nice foliage all the way around. Or at least on the sides as well as the front. Think of a mountain shape rather than bleachers, lol.

Wow..This has to be one helluva wake up call. Just when I thought I had em all figured out, I get a reality check. I hate to impose this on you guys but would you be kind enough to edit the picture pointing out your thoughts and repost or email it to me? My email is on the profile here if you click my name link.

Thanks again and I appreciate your help very much
v

I made some change. Not sure where the Jacob Cline should go. Let me know what you guys think...the above pic from my original thread should reflect my changes...

thanks

What I think is that it's time to bring out the shovel and get to work. There aren't any obvious goofs like large plants hiding groundcovers, or plants in obviously the wrong conditions, so mostly it's a matter of personal preference. In the end, you can't grow somebody else's garden. You have to grow your own. In the end, you have to get your hands dirty to find out what that means. If you decide you don't like it, most perennials aren't hard to move, and you'll have the increased understanding of what it is you don't like. Maybe it will turn out too sparsely planted, maybe it won't bloom well enough at a time of year people are out to look at it, maybe you see other plants in other people's gardens you simply like better. But at that point, you'll know that.

Here's a sort of rough idea done in Paint on my computer. Keep in mind that it is absolutely NOT to scale and that the plantings should actually be more irregular than is easily done in Paint, and do not represent one plant, but a block of them. This is a mostly blue & yellow bed, with some red. All the gaillardias are planted together. The groundcover sedums curve along the front and slightly up the sides. The catmints are a total of 3 plants in a triangle arrangement & sprawl over the dying bulb foliage, represented as purple here, but could be any color or combo, as nothing else in the bed will be up when they bloom.

I added a tall variegated yellow & green sedum, Sedum alboroseum Mediovariegatum, (3-5 plants depending on space) to the side edge, or you could use any of the others I suggested earlier. It's nice to have something structural along the edges of beds and especially things like this sedum that has all season color. Blooms are whitish. The Boltonia & Jacob Cline are centered. You could make the bed less symetrical by moving them a bit more to one side if you prefer. They do not bloom together, but will be the tallest plants in the bed when they do bloom, except for the grasses. So they could be flipflopped front to back, or even interplanted, but remember you will probably need to cut down the monarda after bloom. The gaillardias (you didn't say what type) will bloom from mid-season to very late and I made the mums a yellow or orange or combination (on the same flower of both colors), which looks lovely with blues. Sorry, my typing is pushing down the Paint sketch. More info under it.
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The unnamed spaces can be filled eventually with other plantings, as I think you will have plenty of space. The yellow block on the right could be a repeat of the variegated yellow & green sedum on the left side, or any long lasting yellow perennial, such as almost any coreopsis, or yellow carpet roses (3-5 plants). (They are easy to get at from the side for trimming and cutting flowers!) The dark blues represent spiky dark blue things like Salvia May Night (3-5) or the shorter Marcus (5-7), Veronica Royal Candles or Goodness Grows (3-5), whatever fits your climate. The yellow could be any coreopsis (threadleafs 5-7, or 3 of the larger types) or any yellow daisy flower, or even a small selection of daylilies, whatever you like that blooms in June-July. The yellows and dark blues could be flipped back to front depending on the heights of the plants you select, as could the mums (remember the mums will be just green plants most of the season and may need regular pinching to be full & mounding).

It's hard to tell where to put the stones without using a scale (or even with one) but you need to be able to work on the various plants. The ones in front should be surrounded by the low sedums. You'll probably have to hop onto the one behind the gaillardias to trim the catmints or pick of dead bulb foliage and you may possibly need two more stones, one on each end towards the middle of the bed, depending on how long your arms are. LOL.

You could also shift the colors of the bed to a more pink-red-burgandy color scheme if you don't want all the yellow. Change the large sedums to pink-red bloomers, plant dark burgandy gaillardias, make the coreopsis a yellow with dark red-burgandy eyes, the other yellow spot could be replaced with red daylilies or red carpet roses. Have fun. Hope this help somes.

lellie

you just made my drawings look pretty darn ameteur..thanks for all the help. Thank you everybody. I have a perfectly good idea on how you experts think....As you pointed out, time to get down and dirty...

V

Be sure to post a pic when its all a'bloom.

I am impressed by all of you who have the facility and computer expertise to plan things like this out. I wish I could do that. But for me, the reality is that I have been gardening for over 20 years and have only planned things on paper once or twice. And what I ended up with didn't look remotely like what I planned on paper anyway. So I gave that up long ago. I think paper planning is useful in designing whole sites. Some people do it very well for planting individual beds, especially larger specimen plants. Not me.

I am definitely of the 'mad gallica' school of gardening. I plan and plant perennials at the same time, in the ground, with an eye to creating vignettes of a few complementary plants, and often an overall theme for an area (color scheme like blue and yellow and orange, or a no-water bed, etc).

I personally wouldn't like a bed backed by tall miscanthus as a hedge or in a row. Unless you have to screen, I would want to bring them forward in the bed as irregluarly placed specimens. I think the number you have is perhaps too big. For me, narrow upright conifers make a better backdrop for a bed, or shrubs.

I have tried symmetrical planting schemes and ultimately abandoned every one. Number one, they are restictive if you have a plant collector instinct, and you can have more different kinds of plants in the same area if you aren't symmetrical. Or, bigger masses of the same plant. Number two, I found that symmetrical planting schemes rarely end up looking that way, at least for me. The growing conditions on one side of the bed will be different than on the other, sun, wind, soil, competition different.

If I were planting a bed like this I would go for a primary and secondary focal point (specimen grass, clematis on an obelisk, specimen shrub, etc), irregularly placed, and then plant around those. "Throw paint at the palette, scrape it away where you don't like it, add more paint", etc. It's a different way of gardening, experimental, and changing over time. But like mad gallica says, perennials are very easy to move and gradually you will get it right. And often the plants will surprise you in showing you what looks great together when you don't expect it.

David_5311! How thrilling to see your words again! We're all clamoring for updated photographs on the "a few more new garden beginnings ..." thread! :)

All excellent points, David, especially "the plan" versus reality issue. But I had to giggle when you mentioned computer expertise. Paint is a very primitive program found in Accessories on my computer and is not intended for landscape design. It takes about 5 minutes to learn, as it has so few things you can do - create a few shapes, draw & stretch lines, add some color, & a few words. There is no easy way in Paint to show upright or spiky shapes and you would also have to draw drifts, interwrapped paisley shapes, and do any framing of plants or other focal points by hand in Paint. Anyway, it's way too tedious to use for a detailed garden plan, at least if you are a plantaholic like me. I do find it useful for color blocks and rough proportions and it makes quick and easy records for when you are moving plants around. After working in a bed, when things are still fresh in my mind, I can come in the house and draw a quick "blob" diagram of where things are in a small portion of the garden. Then print it & throw it into my garden notebook. I find myself forgetting more and more and these little aids work well.

As for the OP's garden plan, I believe that since he has already planted a line of tall grasses and selected mostly shortish plants for the bed, that the grasses are the focal point for this garden and the surrounding plants are the supporting players, at least once the grasses obtain some height. I suggested a few more easy care plants (larger sedums, upright salvias or veronicas to play off the upright grasses, and coreopsis) since there was room in the bed and these all look well with grasses. I was hoping to point out, in a visual way as he had done with his drawing, that the plants need to be organized in some way other than just dotted in rows in front of the grasses and that some sort of a color theme might be helpful. The plan is very symetrical, pushed a bit that way by the long row of same height grasses, but doesn't have to be, if the few taller plants he plans to add are put off to one side (perhaps centered front to back & about 1/3 from one outside edge). Having some huge grasses planted in very heavy clay, I hesitate to even hint to anyone that they should move their grasses, although I agree that they are more effective as specimens. However, they do make a nice privacy wall for most of the year.

P.S. I did plan (measure & graph out) carefully the shrubs and trees in my garden, since I have a fairly small garden space, but only roughly plan out perennial plantings (mostly by shapes & textures) & these days mostly wander around the yard with plant in hand trying (very hard) to find a place to plant it. And BTW, I am fundamentally unable to stick to any color plan, there's always something new to try. LOL.

Thanks Leslie for the comments and pointers about how to use the paint programs. For me it would not be simple, especially if I were teaching myself. I would probably be a better gardener if I did what you did and sketched things out after I planted them. It would help with the "what the heck is that plant coming up there"? questions that come up in the spring, and also to play with redesigning areas over our too long winters.

I hope neither you nor vinny would take anything I said as critical at all. It was not intended to be, just feedback (which was asked for) from me about the bed design. You are absolutely right about the backbreaking work required to move a large miscanthus. I still think I would do it if it were my bed, since the miscanthus are all lined up at the back and will take up 1/2 the visual space of the bed. Also looks like the lawn comes right up to the back of the miscanthus 'hedge'. That is likley to be a maintenance problem. Unless this is really functioning as a hedge, I think the bed would benefit from fewer miscanthus moved up into the bed itself. I appreciate that you were trying to get away from 'lines' of plants in your suggestions too. Lines of plants tend to look static and predictable as you have pointed out. Anyway, just my .02

David, absolutely no problems here. Your advice is always clear, helpful, and most kindly stated.

Vinny, Dave got me started thinking about your grasses. I don't remember if you said what kind they are, but I have some that (in my wet clay soil) have gotten really large.

I have a Miscanthus sinensis Strictus that is over 3 feet in diameter on the ground and over 5 feet wide at the top by the end of the season. It doesn't always bloom in my short season, but it did this year and spread open (no flopping, but open) to even wider than 5 feet at the top. We saw one this year at a botanical garden that was even larger than ours, sort of scared us.

My M. Variegata has a slightly smaller footprint than Strictus, but is less erect with a sort of wide waterfallish effect, doesn't exactly flop but needs some help. M. Graziella, now 4 years old, is close to 2 and a half foot wide at the base (and very tall with large whitish plumes that glow in the fall sun) and the smallish M. Purpurescens is about 2 feet wide and very floppy. I'm not sure how big these 2 will get eventually, but Strictus seems to have no boundary.

I also have a Panicum (Shenandoah) that is somewhat on the short side, 4-5 feet in bloom, that has got almost as wide as my outstretched arms and is completely blocking a pathway. This one started out as a few stems! My Feather reed grasses (Overdam) and pennisetums (Hamelin) are all dwarf ones, so a smaller, more manageable scale. Just something else for you to think about! :~) BTW, I planted all these grasses, rather than using more evergreens, because I wanted the movement they provided and the soft effect they have in the garden. Got what I wanted but the shrubs would have grown slower.

I have to say, threads like this are a perfect example of why I love to come to this place. Leslie and David, I have so much respect for your knowledge and creative ideas, and gardening smarts - and genuine kindness towards others who need a hand. It's wonderful that someone like Vinny can come in here and not be ridiculed or spoken to sarcastically or harshly, as I've seen happen on so many other discussion forums, whether the topic be gardening or NHL hockey or classical music.

I just continue to be impressed with this community even after 5 years. LOL, my morning routine (after my garden walkabout) is to flip through the paper, sigh with disgust at the insane world we live in, and then come over here and breathe a sigh of relief!!

So THANK YOU, Leslie, David and all the other wonderful experts here who take the time to share and teach.