The Fundamentals of Landscape Planting Design

1. Skillshare Introduction: H Hi, and welcome to my course on the fundamentals of landscape planting design. Now, plants are an element within our gardens, and their selection and placement is just as important as any kind of paving materials that you pick out, any kind of structures, arbors that you may design into the garden. So whatever you're designing, the plants should reinforce what the solution, what your intent is. Do you have a walkway going along? Maybe you want hedges along to reinforce that movement. So that's what we're going to be talking about within this course. And we're going to be starting with looking at the conceptual planting plan because a conceptual plan is a starting point where you can go to your client, you can say, Here's the ideas that I want. I want shade trees here. I want hedging over here. I want perennials in this area without being specific to the actual plant species. But in the conceptual phase, the plants are, especially the trees drawn to scale to represent what their mature size is going to be. Now, when we go to develop our working drawing, our actual planting plan, we have already decided the scope and size and purpose of the plants that we are looking to install and have installed into our gardens. And we'll carry this on into a full working drawing, how to label your plan properly for installation purposes, and then how to actually bid this out for budgeting purposes and bidding. So that's where we're going to take all of this. You will have an assignment later in the course where you'll do your own planting design that you can send over to me, and I can critique and offer suggestions if you want me to. So that said, let's go ahead and jump into this, and let's get started with fundamentals of landscape planting design. 2. Class Project: Hi, and welcome to this lesson. And this one, I'm just going to just talk briefly about the project for the course. And of course, this is a course on landscape planting design. So your project is to do a landscape planting design. And I have provided examples for you. I've given you an example of a conceptual garden plan. I've given you an example of an actual working drawing, a planting plan that I did that shows all of the labeling of the plants, their locations within the landscape, their quantity, container size, botanical and common names. All of this is information that if you're doing a planting plan for yourself, for a client, you're going to need to have all of this information not only for clarity's sake, but also for bidding purposes. So the project is to develop a concept plan, a concept planting plan, and you can use the blanks that I have provided to you. I've provided you a couple of different site plans that show the footprint of the house, the property lines, and I've provided this for you in both imperial measurements, feet and inches and in metric. So it should work wherever you are living and working. Again, I've also got the concept plan example just for your reference and then a planting plan. So develop concept plan and a planting plan to be able to be uploaded to the project gallery. I've also got examples in the course of what a mood board would be, and a mood board is just something to focus your attention and more graphically depict your design intent. So you can go to a client this and say, This is what I've got, but it's a flat piece of paper. It's colored. That's true. But it doesn't really get the idea across as effectively as if you had a mood board along with you, which simply is another way of taking photographs of your design ideas, furniture, plantings, water features. And you'll see that within the course because we're going to cover the whole thing within this course and how you develop this stuff. So anyway, take a look at that and I look forward to seeing what you come up with and some projects showing up in the gallery. And if you have any questions along the way, then feel free to be in touch, and I will be available to help move you along. Okay, that's our project, so let's go on into the meat of the course, and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Plants are Living Things: Hi, and welcome to this lecture. And in this one, I just want to talk about plants as living things. And they are going to have environmental requirements, needs to survive and thrive. And we need to be aware of what those are. Ideally, what we want to do is use plants that are adapted to where we live and work. Now, again, I'm in northern California. I'm on the Inland Valley. We have temperatures that range from the upper 20 degree Fahrenheit range in the winter to 100 hundred and ten degrees in the summer. So we have a wide range. The upper temperatures aren't necessarily as critical as our minimum temperatures. So wherever you live, you want to be aware of what the minimum temperature is that you're going to be working within. Now, again, I'm in a Mediterranean climate. I have minimum temperatures of about 25 28 degrees in the winter on a cold winter. Now in the United States, we have 13 different hardiness zones that the Department of Agriculture has designated. Zone one would be up in the interior of Alaska where temperatures easily drop below 50 degrees Fahrenheit and -50 degrees Fahrenheit to Puerto Rico zone 13, where the minimum temperatures are going to be seldom below 60 degrees. So the plants in Puerto Rico certainly won't survive in Alaska. The plants in Alaska, many of them will not survive in the hot, humid climate of Puerto Rico. So we want to be aware of what these temperature ranges are. But it's more than that. It's what kind of aspect or where do the plants naturally grow to where they're going to be able to survive and thrive within the landscapes that we're designing. So for example, I may say, Hey, I've got the north side of the house. I could put azaleas, hydrangas north facing, you know, cool, loving plants in that area feeling that they're not going to get the hard, hot summer afternoon sun. But if I'm not careful, that sun can swing pretty far north in g summer here in my area. And even on the north side of the house, I can have hot afternoon sun coming in that would burn the plants that I thought were going to be safe. So when you're doing a planting design, part of your job is to do a site analysis. Go out and see what the sun and shade patterns are throughout the day, so you have a better idea of how hot it's going to be or how shady it's going to be in this particular area. Another tip is that you want to be able to group plants together based on their exposure and their water needs. Now, here in California, we have something called the water use classification of landscape species, which just basically says, Is this a low, medium or high water use plant? And we can use this information in grouping plants together so that when we're irrigating them, we can do it very efficiently. Now, depending on where you live, you may or may not have access to this type of information directly, but your local garden center or Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Extension office can give you information on this as well. So when you're designing, we want to make sure that we're working with plants that are going to be adapted to the region. Again, I'm in a Mediterranean climate. I have a lot of native plants here in California that I can work with in my central Valley region. But because we are a Mediterranean climate, I can use plants from Southern Europe. I can use plants from Australia. I can use plants from South Africa. So I can use plants that are adapted to these conditions. But I'm not going to use plants that are necessarily adapted to other kind of climactic conditions that I know are not going to survive in the extremes of temperature or the soils that we have here in my region. So again, I'll be working with plants within this course and throughout this course that are adapted to where I live and work, but I'm picking them based on their function and then selecting them and placing them appropriately. Wherever you live, you need to do the same thing. Go to your local garden centers, get to know the plants where you live and then use them in replacement of what I may be using because what I'm using you may not have access to or they may not be applicable. But the overall direction, the overall process is the same. And that's where we're going to go in the next lecture is start looking at the process of developing a planting plan to where we can actually take a conceptual plan such as this right here and turn this into an actual working drawing that you could hand over to your gardener, landscape contractor, whoever, and they can take it and install it for you or you can go to your local nursery and say, these are the plants I want, and you're confident that they are a working drawing that is going to work well and survive in your particular garden. So let's take a look at that whole process and get it started, and then we're going to work our way on into actually developing our planting plan. Okay, thanks for watching and I will see you in a bit. So 4. Planting Design Objectives: Okay, let's talk about some objectives in this lesson. And in this one, I want to talk about planting design objectives. So your client may or may not have an idea of what kind of plants or the style of the garden that they would like to see. But you as the designer should have objectives and have an overall direction that you would like to garden in. So if your gardens out in the country, if you're working in a rather rural area or at least some ground around you, maybe a cottage style garden would fit the architecture of the home and the site. Well, what is a cottage garden style? And to me, cottage gardens would be perennials, ornamental grasses, plants that would tumble over pathways and blur those lines of the path and give a little extra visual movement. Also be, you know, picking the proper paving material for your pathways. So for a cottage style, I would probably want to have something fairly informal. So it could be native stone, native flagstone, could be used brick, something along those lines that I feel would be historically accurate to that kind of a garden. And I would do some research on this, if necessary, to find out, you know, what kind of plants were used. What kind of, I don't know, hybrid perpetual roses might have been used or shrub roses that might cascade and be inform looking. Plants that would have evoke that fragrance that you would imagine in a perennial garden. You know, what kind of trees might have been used, and knowing that you're going to be working with plants that are going to have to stay within the confines of the area where they're planted. So we're minimizing the amount of maintenance that might be necessary, other than if you have perennials, yes, you're going to have wintertime pruning down, cutting back of flowers and such. But overall, you want to keep this to a minimum to keep the garden going and looking good but not become a burden. So on another hand, your client may have sculpture that they want to show off some kind of artwork. Well, this may lead to a more structured style of garden, and that could mean clipped boxwood hedges. Uh Tea roses, standard tea roses standing in a line like sentinels along the backside of the boxwood hedge, a more formal pathway or pattern, rather than flagstone, it might be cut blue stone or something along those lines that lead and lend to that formality of your design solution. Again, whatever you're designing, you want these plants to reinforce your ultimate design solution within the garden. Another part of this is what is the site itself like? So, here in northern California, we have a lot of native oaks. And while oaks are not necessarily drought tolerant, per se, our oaks do need their winter rains, but they have evolved and adapted to our long, dry, hot California summer, especially up here in the foothills. We're not in a fog belt. So if I design a garden and I'm putting in plants that require a fair amount or even an average amount of summer irrigation, this can lead to root problems and disease for the oaks that are on the site. So if I'm going to be designing under or near oaks, I need to start thinking about what kind of objectives? What are the plant selections that I'm going to have to work with so that I'm not compromising these trees and potentially losing them on the site because I made a bad decision. So I may be looking at natives or adaptable plants that I would put in in the fall and minimal summer irrigation and keeping it targeted to that plant for the first, you know, couple of seasons until it is adapted, and it can take care of itself, and we can pull irrigation away from those trees so we don't compromise them. And it's going to be this type of overall thought and precision that we need to put into our planting designs even at the conceptual stage. At that conceptual stage, we're still looking at, Oh, I want to bring people out into the garden. I've laid out the form that I want. How am I going to reinforce this? Do I want to have a seating area? And if I do, do I want to do arbors and put vines over it to provide shade? Do I want to just use trees that are going to have a canopy broad enough to provide shade in the summer, but perhaps sun in the winter or early spring. So these are all considerations, and at conceptual stage, I'm going to be laying out my plant selections, even though I don't know what they are at this stage, not necessarily what they are. I'm still going to be looking at the function that I want them to be performing at and I don't want them to be too large. I don't want trees that are going to be too large for the site. I want to have trees that are going to be proportional to the house and the property, the project area that we're working with. And in the next lesson, we're going to revisit a conceptual plan and conceptual planting plan, and we'll take a look and see how this planting plan reinforces the overall structure of the garden and then how we can use these ideas, these conceptual planting plans to make ultimate species selection when we do our actual working drawing. So there we want to be aware of what are the objectives of the client? What are the demands of the site that we are working with? What is the design solution that we are coming up with? And how can we use plants to reinforce that design solution to make all of this come together and be the garden that we want our clients to enjoy and that they're going to be happy to show off and that we're going to be very happy and pleased to say, I designed this. This was what we did, and it's going to be a feather in your cap, as well. Okay, let's take a look at the conceptual plan and just see how this is going to aid us on down the line when we actually get into making our plant selections. Okay. I'll see you in a bit. 5. The Conceptual Plan A Review: Okay, let's talk about the conceptual plan and what its purpose is. When you're starting to design for someone, you've gone in and met them. You've either done your own site survey, they've provided you with a site plan of the property. You want to come up with your design solutions. But the purpose of the conceptual plan is it's acting as a discussion document. You're coming up with initial ideas that you can then take to them and say, Here's what I'd like to do. I want to take a path down this way. I'm going to set an arbor and a seating area over here. I'm going to use a water feature here as a focal point, and I'm going to have some plants and trees that are going to reinforce this. It's going to give shade along the pathway. The hedging or plants along the path are going to reinforce that movement. Um, you're going to have fragrance along the path. You're going to have maybe something special at the end of the view that becomes kind of a focal point and draws them down to it. You might do some kind of arbor and trellising that actually frames the view and encroaches in on the path a little to where it opens up again on the other side. These are all conceptual ideas that you can take to your client and then say, Here's what I want to do. Here's where we're going to go with this. And they say, I like a plan. I think it's great. What are these plants over here? What are these trees over there? And at that stage, it's perfectly fine for you to say, I don't know. Now, if you have an idea, fine, spit it out. But if you don't know, it's okay to say so because what you're doing is getting the ideas across and making sure the client's happy with what your solution is. And it doesn't have to be a paying client. It could be friends or family or even just yourselves, but you want to have something that you can analyze and think about and sleep on, so to speak. So part of the reason is, if I did a plan similar to this guy right here with all the layout, all the pathways, water features, patio setup. And I went to all the trouble of selecting all of the plants early on. And then I bring this plan to whoever I'm presenting it to, and I say, Here it is. And they say, you know, no, this isn't what we were looking for. Let's start over. Well, that could throw a whole slew of your plants out the window because they're not going to work within the new context. It could throw a lot of the different elements that you've been thinking about out the window if you've been too specific. So by being a little more general, it gives you that wiggle room to make adaptations and changes to the plan early on, and especially in the plant material. Now, the client says, Gosh, I love it. I love everything about it. Let's go ahead and carry on with it. Now, this plant material, you've already thought about what the function of it is. And now you can start looking and saying, now I know what the function is. This is what I'd like it to be. And in the back of your mind, you've also been thinking about species, even if it's not conscious, and you can go ahead and start selecting the actual plants that are going to be installed on down the line. So let's look at this same conceptual plan and just see how the plants help to reinforce the overall movement and design solution that Scott produced. Okay, here's this conceptual plan, and we've got our cul de sac right over here. We've got a driveway coming in. Well, most people are parking out here in the cul de sac, especially if there's more than one or two people. So rather than them coming in on the driveway where their first view is that of a garage door, Scott developed an entry walk right over here. Now you can come in at the entry. A water feature at this point, acts as a focal point or a draw so it detracts you from this area. You also have some taller shrubs and a small tree, which helps to screen the driveway area from the entry walk coming in. You can still come in off the driveway if you've parked out here. But now your focus is coming right into the entry of the home. Now, as you come in, you can turn and come in this direction, plantings are screening the facade of the home, giving up more of a garden feel. Native trees that have been drawn to scale with the diameters of the trees depicted with very little or no planting underneath them so that, again, they're not compromised by over irrigation in the summertime. But then a little bit of a backdrop of some kind of a taller tree, and it's got kind of a spiky look to it. So it just kind of says, Well, maybe I could put in some dwarf juniper or something along those lines that would be applicable, but provide a little bit of screening and visual separation from the neighbors over on this side of the fence. The pathway comes down, and this is really just a utilitarian path to come around the side of the house to get to the back garden. So the same small tree or tea roses, something along here, again, we don't know what it is. We don't have to know. But the fact that there's five of them and they're all the same. Kind of reinforces movement coming down along this path. But then we've got an overhead arbor that was designed in with vines growing on it, which kind of gives this look of, gosh, I'm transitioning from just a utilitarian walking area into the back garden. As you come in, the arbor continues along the backside, some kind of ornamental, small ornamental tree right in this area. Again, all of these would be drawn to scale to the diameter that you ultimately want them to see. By drawing them to this diameters, particularly the trees, now when it comes time to select a plant, you can say, I want a tree that's going to be ten foot in diameter, 15 foot in diameter, whatever. You've drawn it to scale. You know how it's going to proportionally fit within your garden scheme. Knowing the diameter and roughly diameter and height can be equal, and then you can start looking at trees that are going to fit that function. And it kicks a whole bunch of trees out of the way that if you hadn't put this kind of thought into it early on, you would still be potentially considering to put into the garden without realizing, Oh, gosh, these are going to get to be too big. I've got to back this off. So now you've already got this size, this function nailed down. Now you can go to the different websites, different nursery websites, whatever your knowledge base is and say, This is the size tree I want. This is the color bark I want. This is, you know, anything that I've already taken into consideration at this stage and select that plant on down the line. This is another reason for this conceptual plan. So you come into the back garden, again, the stone has changed slightly. This was more of a flagstone paver cut stone. By the time you come through and transition into the back garden, the graphics are depicting a more free form flagstone or some other kind of stone. So it changes the feel of your entry into the back garden right there. You have an entry into the house at this point, but you also have a private entry off of the back bedroom at this location here to come out into the garden. Decompose granite or gravel as a ground cover paving material in this area, another water feature, another small arbor and some taller shrubs back here to give privacy from the neighbors on this backside. So all of these plants are reinforcing what this movement is and how the species are actually selected. Will now ultimately become a lot easier when you go to your catalogs or your own knowledge base, visit the nursery and say, This is what I want to use. This is the exposure that I'm working with with sun and shade, what plants are going to work best. And now you can plug those plants into your working drawing, and from there, we can come up with an actual costing and then final installation of your design. So that's really the purpose of the conceptual plan and the conceptual planting plan is to think through these different elements early on so that when you get to the point of doing your working drawing, a lot of the questions that you may have that you hadn't answered if you went straight to a design, then it's been taken care of, and you've got your client on board with you. So that's the conceptual plan. Let's wrap up this section, and in the next section, we're going to start looking at the actual working drawing and how to put that together, label it properly, and so we can do some costing. Okay, thanks for watching. I will see you in a bit. 6. Section One Wrap Up: Okay, let's wrap up Section one. And in this section, we've covered a fair amount of ground. It's only been a few lectures, but we've talked about plants as living beings, and we need to understand what their needs are, what the conditions are that they're going to thrive in and understand these aspects of our plantings, so we're going to give them the best chance of survival as we possibly can and not just survival, but to thrive and do what we want them to do. We've talked about some design objectives, planting design objectives, knowing what our clients specifically want, or at least what they are hinting at. If they don't really know, but they're kind of talking in circles, you need to be able to interpret what they're saying and pull those ideas out and then coalesce it into a conceptual plan that answers the questions that they may not even know that they had. So the design objectives of the client, the planting design objectives of the site, what is going to be appropriate for where you are actually designing. What are your objectives as the designer to put your stamp of creativity and plant knowledge into your design, and the plants are going to be there to reinforce your design solution and make it work properly all the way down the line. There's still plenty of room for adjustment and modification, but you're coalescing all of these ideas down, and it's going to be much more efficient by doing it this way. So that was Section one. Section two, we're going to get more into the meat of planting design and actually selecting plants that are going to be appropriate for the purpose that you were looking at. Again, I'm in northern California. I'm going to be working with plants that are familiar to me and that I use, and I'm going to explain how they work within my design solution. Wherever you are, you're going to have to take this concept, these ideas and adapt them to your climate and the plant palette that you have to work with. But the overall functionality and the overall direction is going to be pretty universal. So it's just going to be educating yourself about what you have available. Enough of that for now, I will see you in the next section, and thanks for watching. And let's move on. 7. From Concept to Working Plan An Introduction: Okay, welcome to Section two. And in this section, we're going to move ahead from the conceptual plan and jump into actually developing a working drawing, a landscape plan that someone could take out into the field, and they're going to know what species is going to go. Where? Where does this tree go? Where does this shrub go? What size plant is going to be, what size container that you're going to be putting in the ground? So we're going to start talking about the actual working drawings of a planting plan. And the planting plan does become the catalyst for all of the subsequent plans that may be required for a landscape installation. Once we know what the plants are, then we're going to know what is going to be the best application of irrigation. We're going to know how we want to lay out low voltage lighting if we choose to do something along those lines. We're going to know about arbors and how their construction may be fitted into this. But the planting plan becomes this base catalyst to help launch us into all of these other modes. So this course is about planting design, and we're going to talk about going from the conceptual plan to the working drawing. I'm going to talk about the actual labeling process, what I feel is the best way to label the plants on the plan for clarity's sake, and then using this information to create a plant list or plant legend. And finally, using that to be able to get a cost on the materials on the plant material from our plant broker, local garden center or nursery. So that's where we're going in this one. So let's go ahead and get started, and we'll take a look at going from a conceptual to an actual planting plan in the next lecture. Okay, I will see you in a bit. 8. The Functional Diagram: Hi, and welcome to this lesson. And in this one, we're going to start looking at how to develop a conceptual plan. And when you're going with that, we're going to start with a functional diagram or bubble diagram, some people call it. And because I want my plants to be not just attractive on the property, but I want them to fulfill a purpose. I need screening over here. I need screening over there. I need low mounting shrubs here to create some separation between one space and another. I want low ground cover to give an open feeling. I want trees for shade, you know, whatever it might be accent plants to pull you both visually and physically through the garden. So that's how I'm going to start, and you do this by doing a bubble diagram, functional diagram, and then you can take that information and turn it eventually into an actual conceptual plan that you would show to your client. Now the conceptual plan in turn, becomes the springboard for creating the actual working drawing where you're selecting the species, the numbers, the container size, and so on. So let's start with our functional diagram. And to do that, we're going to turn to the board and look at the site plan and how I get started. So here's our site plan, and all of this open space our planting areas in here, the walkways in off of the road have been defined. Water feature this coming around is defined this is a walkway into the back patio. And then a service walkway on this side of the house, as well. So to create a functional diagram, I'm going to first off I'm going to lay a piece of trace paper over the top of this because I don't want to mess up my original drawing. Now, this is an 8.5 by 11. If this was an 11 by 17 or 24 by 36, I would do the same thing. So I'm just going to take this and lay this thin trace paper over the top of it. And what's nice is I can see through it. I can see all my structure, but, you know, I'm not messing up my original drawing. So knowing the property, knowing what functions I need my plants to fulfill, I can just start putting bubbles down. And by that, I mean, I'm going to just come and put a drawing right here, and I'm going to call that tall. I call it tall screening. At this point, I can come in and say I want to have some low ground cover. I'm going to put in some accent plants here. I'm going to put in some medium and then some more accent plants here. I'm going to have this be medium to give some visual blockage from the driveway. And then because this is the entry off of the road, then I'm going to go ahead and have a small tree on each side of the walk. Now I'm coming in. I'm going to go ahead and because there's neighbors, I'm going to just throw a bubble over here and call this medium to tall screen. And because this is the driveway, I'm going to keep that as a low ground cover. So if somebody opens a car door, that's not going to be an issue. Now they have access into the garden this way. They have access to the garden this way, but they also have access to the backyard right here. Well, I'm going to add an arbor with vine, and I'm gonna go ahead. I'm going to put some hedging on each side to help redefine or help move people along this pathway. I'm going to do accent here with low ground cover here, same ground cover probably on each side. Here I'm going to do tall screening, and I'm going to come over here and I'm going to carry that in, and then I'm going to just have a little bit of low ground cover there because this is a patio area here. It's in full sun. I've got a graveled patio area over in here, which can double as a planting area. But I'm going to go ahead and I'd like to have a little separation, I'm just going to put another arbor in here. I'm going to put some low to medium shrubs on each side, just to kind of give some privacy and define the walkway coming out. Even though it wasn't designed in, I'll throw in some stepping stones. I'm going to bring a low ground cover here. I'm going to put a water feature back there as a focal and a sound. Now I can go ahead and have some accent on each side and put in a couple of chairs or some kind of resting point at that point. So there is a bubble diagram, and it literally can go that quickly. Once you know the property and you understand what you're trying to accomplish, screening, shade, sound of water, ground cover accent plants, you can literally lay it out this quickly. Now, when it comes to creating the actual concept plan, I have a better idea of where I'm going to go with that and then from there, I can create the actual working drawing and select my plant species. But for right now, we've done a functional diagram, a bubble diagram, and I can move on to create the conceptual, which has been done, and at this point, we can jump into in the next lesson, actually defining the plant species. That's the process and it really is about that simple. Let's go ahead and wrap this one up and I'll see you in the next lecture. H. 9. The Final Planting plan: Hi, and welcome to this lesson. And in this one, we're going to pick up where we left off in the previous lesson, where we did our functional or bubble diagram showing the basic use or functions of the plants that we want to put into a project. Now, there's a couple of ways you can work with this. You can take a functional diagram and take that information and use it to create a conceptual plan for your client, such as this one right here, showing the overall properties and function of the plants that you'd like to include in the design. And depending on your relationship with the client and the progress with this individual project, you can go from a functional diagram directly to a planting plan. And I have done that in the past, again, depending on the individual project and client. I know I'm just basically doing a planting plan for them, so I'm going to go ahead and get a little more specific and start naming out what it is that I want to put into the project, and then I can walk them through it that way. So let's go ahead and take a look at the board and see where we're at, and we'll have a quick review of the last lesson and then, you know, coming into it with the plant graphics to create an actual planting plan. So here's where we left off with our functional diagram. I needed some tall screening right in here. I wanted some accent plantings. I wanted some low ground cover, some trees, screening back in the back here, screening in this area. So all of this is going to start to drive the plant selections that I'm going to be looking at. And what I've done is, again, I kept this sheet clean while I was working up these functional diagram ideas. So now, I started creating an actual planting plan. And at this point, what I'm looking at is trying to come up with plants that are going to physically fill the space properly. So I've got screening back here, and to denote what this screening is, I'm going to come in and rather than saying it's T one or T two or S one or S two, I'm actually going to use the first three letters of the genus and the species to identify what these seven trees screening trees are right along here. And based on the amount of room that I have to work with, I have selected I wanted an evergreen. I wanted something that would be low maintenance. So Juni Paris chinensis. The first three letters of the genus, the first three letters of the species. And in this instance, I am going to be looking at using a variety called Spartan because a spartan will get to be about 15 feet tall and three to five feet wide. That's a perfect size for this location. I need something that'll get a little bit of height to it. I'll close in on itself, and it won't get overly wide. It won't become massive. So the maintenance is going to be fairly easy to maintain and take care of. So what I've done is I have given these junipers a distinctive graphic to themselves. Now, I needed accent plants. So I've got accent plants down here on the flat. This is a little bit raised up. And they also have their own distinctive graphic to them. I've got five of them here, but I also have three more right over here. So visually, I can see that these are the same plant within this design. And I went ahead and because I wanted kind of an accent plant, something that would throw some color, I chose just common garden hydrang hydrangia macrophyla and I say that there's eight of them. Well, I can see three right here where I'm denoting the plant. So if I'm looking at it from a contractor's or installers viewpoint, say, Well, there's eight. I only see three. Oh, here's the other five. Now it's very easy to come in and do the layout of the plant. I wanted some medium plants in here. So in that instance, I would come in, and again, I'm going to just throw a line, and then I will take my line up to that. And I'm going to call T Berberusthumbrgii. So Japanese barberry kind of a nice purple leaf to it. I'll have some nice contrast. And I've got six of them, one, two, three, four, five, six. So now I can just parentheses, put six underneath that. And my installer is going to know, great, I've got six BberousTmbrgii. And that is them right there. And again, the graphic is quite distinct to define what this plant is. And it makes it so much easier than going back and forth with S one. What's S one or S three, whatever this may be. Because I'm not going to remember S three is Berberus and S one is what was that again? I've got to go look at the legend. But when I see the genus and the species, then I can put that together very, very quickly. So that's how you can start putting a planting plan together. And I'm just coming in and picking plants and using my circle template to pick diameters that are going to fit the area most efficiently to help keep maintenance down. I knew I wanted to have some rough hedging over here, so I'm just going to come in and show some masses. But then I can denote how many of these are going to be in here. And in this instance, I didn't want anything terribly tall, but I wanted something that would have some interest to it. So a plant that we call Berkeley sedge, which is a carax is a nice plant. It gets to be about 12, maybe 14 " tall, mounding. So it gives some definition, but it's a soft feel to it that I think would work really well next to flagstone. So that would be the plant that I would choose for this. And I can just note this on my plant. So I come back in I put in carats and the species to it, and I've got seven of them. I'm going to just denote that in that fashion. Now I've got a nice soft grassy plant here and now I can bring underneath my arbor, I can bring a ground cover in, and I'm using Asarum out here, and I think Asarum would be a really nice plant to have back here. So AsarumKdatum, or wild ginger, ASA, CAU, and at that point, I can fine how many are going to be here, so one, two, three, four, five, seven of them, knowing that they spread, nice evergreen broad leaf, deep green ground cover mounds up to about eight to 12 ", so it's not going to be in competition with the carats, but the two textures are going to complement each other. So that's how I start developing an actual planting plan based on the functional diagrams that I developed based on my site analysis of the property. Okay, that's where we're at. So let's go ahead with the next lesson, and I'll see you in a bit. 10. Labeling the Planting Plan: Hi, welcome to this lesson where we're going to talk about how to label your planting plans. And remember, the planting plan is a working drawing. It's something that someone's going to take this sheet of paper out into the field, and they're going to have to be able to identify what the plants are, place them per plan into the landscape to where the crew, whoever's going to actually dig the holes and install them, can do this. And you want it to be able to be done as cleanly and efficiently as possible, especially if you're paying somebody. So the clarity of the plan becomes really important. So there's a couple of different methods that people use for labeling their plans, and we're going to take a look at both of them. I think the easiest way to do it is to just jump onto the board and see what it has to say and kind of look at the pluses and minuses of both. I do have my preferred method, and I will make that clear once we see what we're looking at. So let's turn to the board and take a quick look at how to label plans and make it as clear and intelligible as we possibly can. Okay, let's look at the table. Okay, so I have a planting plan here, and we're just looking at a portion of it. I'll get the concept across, but I want it to be kind of a close up so that we can see what I'm trying to explain. So in this planting plan, the whole identification process, the entire identification process has been through just the same circle. It may vary in size based on the ultimate diameter of the plant. But the only way you're going to know one circle from another is the fact that on the interior, this says S 16. This says S ten. So that's not a quantity. That's just the numerical number of the plant. So this is shrub number 16, shrub number ten. Over here, we have shrub number eight and so on. Same thing with the trees. We have tree number one, T one, T four down here, another T four. Well, the more I look at this and realizing that I've got 20 different shrubs in this property and this landscape. Well, I'm not going to be able to remember what T one is from T ten to T 15. I'm constantly going to have to look at the plan, say, Okay, I've got X number of T tens or S tens in this area. What is S ten? Well, I go back up to my plant list, my plant legend and it says, Oh, S ten is whatever. So I'm going back and forth in that style. The beauty of this, I guess, is that if you take this to a client or your nursery, and they say, Oh, we don't have this or we don't like this particular plant, which should have been sorted before the final planting plan, anyway. But on the plan, S 16 is always S 16. In the legend, you just change the name to whatever the new plant might be. I particularly do not care for this method of labeling a planting plan. I find it confusing. I find that as a landscape when I was doing landscape construction, and I had plans of this nature come through, I would have to look at it, look up. What is it? Okay, let's get these plants and place them over here. To me, it was confusing. So let's look at what my preferred method is and how I think it works out. So let's take another look at the board. So one last look at this plant, you can see here's the front yard symbol botanical name. Well, the symbol is T one, T two, T three for the trees, and so on. And then S one through S 14 for the front yard. The backyard is also labeled, but goes up to S 20. And then they just have the botanical name the common name for it. So Olea Europa would be dwarf olive, two of them, five gallon, a water use calculation, and then a height and a width, which is nice to have on there because it does show you what the ultimate size of the plant on average is going to be. This, on the other hand, is another method. And I'm just going to zoom in a little bit. And in this method, what I'm doing is I'm actually using the botanical names of the plants. So in this instance, I've got let's see. Let's pick this one up here. So I've got Aster, AST, species. I also have lavender, LAV. So the first three letters of the genus, which would be avendula. And the variety that I'm choosing is Grosso. You can see I've got lavender, Grosso, and then in parentheses eight, this line This line brings me down to where these plants are located. Here's my eight lavenders. They're joined together. And you'll see also on this plan that I drew, all of my symbols are slightly different. Here, I've got them joined together. I've got a little circle to show the stem of the plant, where you would plant it. Here, I've got some aslepis tuperosa butterfly weed. And I've got this, and the symbol is a little bit different. I'm showing the circles interconnected, and instead of a circle, I've got a little slash and the same down here, a slightly different symbol and a different diameter because it's a smaller plant. And even these symbols right here are different from the others. So I can easily look at the plan and say, Okay, what is this? And I can come up, follow this over. It says it's Calamagross, Carl Forrester. I've got four of them. And if I look back down, I see one, two. Here's a third one, and then I've got a fourth one over in here. So the symbols are all giving me information. Then I can go to my plant legend. And here's calamgrosis Caro fororster. I've got four of them. They're five gallon size because I'm saying the container size. And then calumgrots coforsterFeather reed grass. As the installer, once I see what the name is in the plant list, and I identify that with the genus and species or genus and variety on the plant itself, it becomes very easy for me to tell my crew or if I'm picking up plants and placing them myself. I know exactly what they are very easily, and I'm not going back and forth with the S 16 or S ten up to the legend coming back out. All of the plants would have been delivered by the nursery or I would have hauled them in myself. I've got them laid out on the driveway in blocks. So all of the coral, you know, calamgross are over here. All of the lavenders are in a block over here. I can very easily have my crew or myself or the homeowners go, pick up what I need, bring it over, and we can place it in the plan in the landscape very easily. So those are the two different ways of labeling, and I've got a couple of examples of my preferred method and the resources for you. But that's how I prefer to do my labeling when I'm doing a planting plan. It's clean, it's professional, and it's easy to understand once you have a little bit of the botanical knowledge under your belt. So that's where we are with that. And so let's go ahead and move on to the next lecture, and we'll keep moving ahead. Okay, thanks for watching and I will see you in a bit. But 11. Creating the Plant List: Hi, and welcome to this lesson. And in this one, we're going to talk about generating the plant list or plant legend that goes onto your design, onto the plan paper. And we're also going to take a look at how you use this to get the costs of the plants from your local nursery or wholesale nursery, whoever it is that you're working with. So a couple of different ways to generate your plant list. And one is, as you're designing your plan, then I would suggest that, especially if you're drawing by hand, that you go ahead and keep a tab of paper next to you. And as you put a plant on the paper on your design, go ahead and jot that down on your separate tablet. And the reason for this is it just makes it a lot cleaner than doing a whole design and then having to go back through the design and locate all of the plants and make sure you've got everything and the quantities and the whole ball of wax. So if you just have a tablet of paper there, I've written down on the plan, I want this plant, Cosa urnata. So I'm going to use the first three letters of the genus and species to as my identification on the plan. So I'm going to write that down on my tab of paper. I'm going to write down once I've determined the quantity, then I'll write down the quantity of the plants. And then I can decide at that point on the container size. And I'll talk about that in a moment. So that way, I can come back in, and if I'm drawing by hand, then I'm going to go ahead and take all of these plants that I have included in my design, and I'm going to plug them into a spreadsheet like Excel. And now I can plug all of this in. I can set up my columns. I can have whatever I'm using to denote which species is which. And then I can do a sort, and I can alphabetize it. And having it alphabetized is a big plus. It's a good just professional way of doing it. But your plant broker or nursery are going to appreciate that because they can just go down the list and go through their plant catalog, and it just rolls really smooth instead of jumping back and forth botanically from one name to another because they're not in alphabetical order. So let's look at the table real quick. And get an idea of what a couple of these different ways of doing your plant list or plant legend would look like. So here is a plant legend that has been generated. This was done on the computer. So I created this plant list on the computer. And what's nice is now they have their own setup within the program on what we're going to be working with. But it gives me my annuals and perennials up here. It gives me the grasses, the ornamental grasses I'm going to be using ground covers because I can sort all of this in the program itself, shrubs over four feet, shrubs under four feet, and then trees. Well, here's my quantity, but this also shows the actual graphic symbol of the plant. So someone can look at this and jump directly over to the plan itself, and each of these different graphics are going to be represented up here in the legend. So we've got that. Then we've got our botanical and common name and then an abbreviation if you choose to put that in. And then, importantly, the container size because that's going to have, of course, a huge factor on the overall cost of your project. So from a computer generated planting plan, this is what a legend plant legend would look like. On the other hand, here's one that I did where I just used Excel, used it as a spreadsheet. I created this plan. We looked at this earlier. So I've got all these different plants. So as I'm writing this out, I'm putting it onto a separate tablet of paper because you can see this is a fairly complicated plan, and having to go back into it and make sure I have gotten every plant that I've specified can take extra time. I don't want to spend that extra time. I'd rather just write it down as I go, put the quantities. I can determine the container size right then and there, or I can do that a little bit later. But then I can take this sheet of paper and again, just type it all up just the way I've labeled it on the tablet and then do a sort, and I can alphabetize this and make it work nice and clean. Then to get a costing on all of this, I can just take this Excel or I can take this plant legend that's been computer generated, and I can email this list to my plant broker, to my wholesale nursery. I can physically walk it into the local garden center and say, can you give me a cost on these plants? And as a contractor or landscape architect or designer, you'll probably get a certain discount off of the plants if you're purchasing them yourself. So that's how you can generate one, your plant list, which needs to be on all of your plans. It has to be clear and identifiable so that whoever's installing the plan they know what plant is going where, what the symbol is, what the abbreviation is to where they can get it out there. And I know a lot of this seems pretty self evident, but at the same time, just getting it down and organized is a critical function in all of this. So that's pretty much it for generating the plant list and then taking that list to your nursery and have them price it out. Don't you go online and try to find the prices, say, on a wholesale plant nursery, because not only are they going to give you the best prices, they're also going to tell you the availability of that plant. So again, back to container size just real quick. Plants like ornamental grasses, I'm going to specify at a one gallon size because in one season, they're going to grow up pretty strong and ful fill in the planting area that I propose them to be filling in. Shrubs more than likely, like the Cross or azaleas or something along those lines, I'm going to go ahead and speck in probably a five gallon because I want to have that bulk and size to it early on. And then for trees, I'm going to jump up to a 15 gallon container size or maybe even a 24 inch box container size depending on the application and the size that I would like to see in the landscape right from the beginning. And now the nursery is going to be able to tell you, is a 15 gallon corns Florida available? Is a five gallon barbers available? And how well rooted are they? So it gives you an opportunity to make some adjustments if necessary. Now, for myself, I will take on the responsibility of locating the plants, making any adjustments or substitutions as necessary with my client's approval to bring the plants to a job site. Then I will be on site, and I will take possession of those plants from the nursery as they're delivered to make sure they are of the quality that I would like to see. And if they're not, I have the opportunity and the discretion to send these plants back. If I don't like the way they look, if they just look, you know, just not a good specimen, I don't have to accept it, and we can wait and get those plants in later. So how do I charge for this? Personally, I'm going to charge for my time. I'm going to charge for my time within getting the plant quotes. I'm going to charge for my time going out to the site and taking them off the truck, approving them. And if I'm going to lay them out for the contractor or the homeowner, I'm going to charge for my time doing that aspect of the work. If I have that part of the contract under my belt, then I'm going to pass the cost of the plants to the client at my cost. I'm not going to do any markups on this. And I know other people will put a ten or 20% markup. That's fine. I don't do that. That's just me personally, but I don't do the installation. I'm not going to dig holes, and I'm not going to put the plant in the ground. I'm not going to run drip lines or irrigation to them. But I will place them and make sure I'm happy with that. And then I give them a bill for my time, and they get a discount on the plants because they're getting them at full wholesale cost. So however you structure your business and however you structure how you give your clients a full value added feature for doing this, that's your decision, but that's how I work. So anyway, that's just kind of plant list and costing them out in a nutshell. And so, with that, let's go ahead and shut this lecture down, this lesson down, and I'll see you in the next one, and we'll keep moving on. Okay, thanks for watching and I'll see you in a bit. 12. Photographic Examples: Hi. And in this lesson, I just want to kind of take us on a photographic journey. And I want to show how plants have been used in different landscapes, different gardens that I have visited over time, and how they fulfill their function for whatever that particular designer or architect was envisioning. You can have your plantings fulfill the function that you need them to and still have the overall structure of your garden, your design approach, your form composition, all tied together to give you that cohesive garden that you are envisioning as the designer. So anyway, let's take a look at some of these different gardens that I have visited over time. Some are large, some are small. Some are very formal, some are very casual. But it's really just to give you kind of a nickel dime tour of how plants can be used in the landscape to fulfill their functions. Okay. Let's just take a look at some of these photos. So this is a very formal garden. This is Valandr a chateau in the Lois Valley in Southern France. And this is what a formal garden actually looks like. You're going to have clients that say, I do not want to have a straight line because a straight line is too formal for me. Straight line does not make a formal garden. A formal garden is what you see here where you have very manipulated plantings. The boxwood are very strictly and closely clipped. There's going to be topiary. There's going to be a lot of different elements in this very geometrical in shape. And this is just the vegetable garden. They grow up to 40 different vegetables in this vegetable garden here. But this is a garden in New Orleans. And again, it's a straight line, but the azaleas that tumbling over the edges of this brick walkway help to blur that edge. Now, it still has a certain amount of formality due to the brick and the material and the way the bricks been patterned. But as the azaleas recede away from us, you can see that they're kind of cascading over that path a little bit more. That's causing some visual tension, and the whole layout is actually dynamic and it helps to move you down along this path. Again, a straight path does not necessarily mean a formal garden. Here's two more examples. This one on the left is a natural garden in Scotland, and again, much less formal because of the gravel pathway, the material. And as you move down the path, again, you've got the plants kind of closing in a little bit. You're getting some shadowing. It's causing some visual attention. But it also is like, Oh, I want to go down and see what's around that bend. The yellow rhododendron with the complimentary colors of the purple plum on the right hand side, become a focal point to help grab your attention. All of the plantings are soft and rounded with the exception of the conifer on the left hand side, which helps to punctuate the scene. On the right hand side, we have a garden I designed a few years back and flagstone paving. And if the bronze sedges hadn't been cut back, they would be tumbling over that pathway and softening all of these edges out really, really nicely. So we also have a very casual and very classic English garden in Southern England, classic herbaceous border, the different perennials. Now, if you look at this, you're going to see a lot of the plants are repeated throughout the garden, and the colors are repeated as well. It's a very soft, natural feel to it with the curves. The yellows of the yarrow in the foreground here on the right hand side are repeated by yellow day lilies behind the red chairs in the background. Red chairs are a complimentary color to all of the greens within this composition. And then, again, the different colors, the pinks and such are repeated throughout. So there's always going to be some unity and repetition which leads continuity within the garden. And that's something we want to strive for. We can also take advantage of borrowed views. Now, another very casual garden. We've got just a gravel pathway. Path varies in size and width, so that gives it a nice, you know, casual feel to it. But the actual boundaries of this garden end right there at the fence line. But you can look at these plantings, look at the colors, and you could imagine that this is just a fence on the property and the property continues on out into that landscape beyond, whereas that is just a borrowed landscape at a pass through out into the open fields. The heavy conifer on the left hand side, kind of leaning over the gate gives depth and perspective to the view. And then all of the plantings, you can imagine them just cascading on out into that nice grassy meadow beyond. So everything plays together. Everything reinforces the movement of this type of a garden design. We can take inspiration from natural landscapes. So this is a small waterfall in the American River Canyon near where I live, and you can see that the plantings are really simple. It's just boulders, moss, and some young ferns that are just sprouting out in the spring. But it lends itself to the ideas of how can I do a natural waterfall for my own garden? And even if it's on a larger scale, this garden is in the Sacramento Valley and it's quite large, but it's evoking a mountain landscape with very large boulders, Japanese maples cascading down to reinforce the cascading of the water. A little bit of conifer is visible in the upper left hand corner. So that is, again, reinforcing the mountain landscape, and even the cherry blossoms hanging down in the foreground on the right help to reinforce the whole feel of an oriental garden. Okay, so we've had an opportunity to look at some photographs of different gardens I've visited. And the whole gist of this is the plants need to reinforce your overall design solution. So the waterfall, the Japanese oriental garden, the Japanese maples are cascading down over the boulders. It's a mountain landscape, even though it's in the valley, the Sacramento Valley. But they've created a mountain landscape, the Japanese maples cascading down, reinforce the waterfall, cascading down. The little bit of conifer on the left hand side that we see in the photograph reinforces that mountain feel. So you've got ideas of putting designs together. The repetition of plant material, the repetition of colors, the repetition of shape all help to create unity and continuity and interconnection within your garden. But what if you've got this great design. But this is all you've got is a flat piece of paper. It's been rendered, it's colored in. That's great. Is there something else you can do to help convey your ideas to your client and help to focus the design for yourself as well? There is, and it's called a moodboard. Here's a couple of mood boards now. We'll take a look at both of these. But it's just a way that you can start doing some research you have an idea of what you'd like the plant material to be or at least what it would like to portray. You might have ideas for water features, you might have ideas for furniture or different kinds of sculpture or furnishings. You can find these photographs. You can go to a site like Pixabay, pixabay.com, and you can get free downloadable professional quality images that you can digitally put together and have them printed. You can have it put on a piece of foam board to where you've got something now that's a good solid presentation. And you can come into your clients and you can say, Here's the ideas that I've got. And it just gives you one more arrow in your quiver, so to speak, on selling your ideas to whoever you're presenting this garden to. Oh, that's our photographic journey in this lesson. So I hope this was useful, and I look forward to seeing you in the next lesson down the line. Okay, thanks for watching. 13. Course Wrap Up: Okay, well, that brings us to the end of this course on the fundamentals of landscape planting design. And I guess my final thoughts are plants are more than just, I'll say, the icing on the cake, so to speak. They're more than just looking pretty in our landscapes. Just like any other feature that we design into the garden, the plants have a role to play. They have a function, and we want to have that function fulfilled. So whether it be a nice flowering shrub or an ornamental tree with brilliant red bark to it, why you have it at the location that you have it? Do you have it out there to be a focal point to help pull people down along a pathway? Hedges, whether they're formally clipped hedges or they're very loose and kind of just casual help to reinforce movement down the same pathway, a water feature, again, a reward, a visual to get us out to another part of the garden. Do we need screening on one side? And if we do, what heights, what density, what width so that we can achieve the function of that screening to hide perhaps an objectionable view to another property or another part of the same property. And we want to pick plants that are going to be low in maintenance, if ideally. So we're not generating a lot of green waste and having to constantly trim and prune these things back. But at the same time, they're achieving their goal. That brings us back to that conceptual garden design. At that point, we've gone through the idea, I need screening over here. I want a focal point out here. I want something to reinforce movement here. I want ornamental grasses or sedges that might help to reinforce a water feature, whether that feature be formal or informal, but it helps to reinforce the whole mood and the feel of the sound and visuals of water within the garden. Where do I need shade? How can I use shade and sunlight and shadow to help move people through the garden? And there comes in the trees, the canopy of the tree. And at that conceptual stage, we're still looking at the ultimate size of the plant, so that once we come into selecting our final planting species and genus, we already know we want something that's going to be 20 feet in diameter, 20 feet tall, something along those lines, that kicks out a whole world of plants that wouldn't be appropriate. So it helps to streamline our process. That was what I was hoping to get across. I hope you found this course valuable and I look forward to seeing you in another one on down the line. So anyway, if you have any questions, then as always, feel free to be in touch, and I look forward to seeing you again in another course. 14. The Graphic Scale: Hi. In this short lesson, I just want to go over the graphic scale and the advantages of always having a graphic scale on any of your plans, planting plan, irrigation plan, site plan, doesn't matter. Include a graphic scale. Typically, our plans will be two scale, 1 " equals ten feet, 1 " equals eight feet, whatever it might be, one to 50, one to 100 if you're in metric. But if you take a plan such as this, and I was to blow it up to an 11 by 17 or an 18 by 24, 24 by 36, that numerical scale value is no longer going to be valid. And the same holds if I have a 24 by 36 and I reduce it down to an 8.5 by 11, again, that numerical scale value is not going to hold because now the plan has either been reduced or expanded. Now, a graphic scale, on the other hand, is just a bar graph that you put on your plan directly. So let's look at a graphic scale on a full sized sheet of paper, a full sized plan, and the advantages of that. Okay, so here is a graphic scale. I've got the numerical scale right here. 1 " equals ten feet. I've got my North arrow, but now I've got a graphic scale down here. If 1 " equals ten feet, I can take my scale rule and I can take my engineer's scale because one to ten is engineer, and if I place this on, indeed, 1 " is ten feet. If I reduce this down in size, and for example, I'm going to bring this guy in. Now, this is 1 " equals eight feet. But if I take my scale rule and I lay this on there, 1 " is actually way over here. This plan has been reduced in size, but during that reduction, the graphic scale reduces down at the same proportion as the rest of the drawing. Conversely, it will expand to the same proportion if I was to take this and blow it up. So all I have to do to be able to get a feel for what the scale is is take my scale rule or some kind of measuring device, and I can say, Oh, eight feet on my graphic scale is right here. There's 02, four, six, eight feet right here. Now I can take something that I can measure with. And in this instance, I just go ahead and use the 16 scale on this rule, and I can lay that on here, and I can see that rather than 1 " equals eight feet, it's a lot closer to half an inch equals eight feet. Well, this is a 16 scale, so that means that eight 16th equals eight feet or one 16th equals a foot. Now I can come on and I can measure different elements within the plan, knowing that each of these 16th inch increments is going to equal a foot, and I can get a fairly accurate assessment of the space that I'm working with. So that's the beauty of always putting a graphic scale to size on your plan, no matter what happens with that plan, if it's reduced and put in a set of, you know, folders for storage, whatever it might be, that graphic scale will still give you an accurate way of measuring elements within the plan. So that's what you might be working with when you download some of these site plans that I've provided for you. Don't just look at the numerical scale and take that for granted. Check it and then use the graphic scale as necessary to get any actual dimensions that you're looking for. Okay, that's it. That's the graphic scale, and I will see you in the next lesson.