The Green Necklace

    In the landscaping world, just like any other profession, there are those little things that “do it yourself” guys do that make the pros cringe. They are our “nails on the chalkboard” experience.  I, like many of my colleagues, have my personal pet peeves. Let’s go through a few of them and hopefully you can gain some insight as to how a professional landscape designer looks at your landscaping.   By avoiding or correcting your landscape mistakes you will have healthier plants as well as knowledge that can give your home that extra something. This will make your neighbors stand up and take notice and hopefully show some of the guys who call themselves “pros”, why these things are not helping to achieve the goals of good landscaping. The topics we will discuss include:  Green Meatballs; The Green Necklace; A Whole Lotta Nothin; Seeing Red; The Minnie Pearl Syndrome;  Crape Murder; Runway Lights; Volcanoes; and The Real Thing. We will be addressing these issues over the next several newsletters. This last of the nine issues we will tackle is “The Green Necklace”.

     The Green Necklace. The practice of placing all similar sized, similar textured, evergreen shrubs in a line around the foundation of the house is what I call the green necklace.   Many times they are the same species–either Ilex or Buxus. Even worse, they are frequently all green meatballs– resembling a necklace of green “beads”. A good foundation planting should have depth. This means it should not be one shrub deep. The bed should be wide enough to have at least a few “layers” of plants. Another good practice is to plant a mixture of evergreen and deciduous shrubs as well as some herbaceous plants in the foundation beds. Mix the textures and colors up. It doesn’t have to be gaudy or garish, but a well planned foundation planting unites the landscape and the house into a more cohesive entity.