Landscaping Project EP4: Designing and Planning (Phase 1, Part 3)
Designing landscaping cannot be done completely without considering plants to some degree. In fact, if you don’t keep plants in mind, you’ll end up with a beautiful hardscape that does not flow with the added plantings. For us, this meant that we had to make sure that our featured plants, or areas with plants, had to be included. This meant that we needed to choose some statement plants that would really help capture the modern, oasis feel that we were trying to achieve.
Lydia and I have a bit of a plant problem. By that I mean that we’re obsessed with plants. Obsessed. For me, the obsession comes in the form of anything tropical, while for Lydia it means color, color, and more color. Luckily for us, the plant world is incredibly diverse and we were able to choose some basic must-haves before we did a more detailed design later. What has a tropical vibe and would be a unique feature plant, but also survives the cold winters along the Front Range in Colorado? Tall grasses might seem to fit the bill, given height and varying interest throughout most of the year. However, these aren’t necessarily ‘tropical’ or exotic feeling, right? Well, it turns out that I also love bamboo, and some forms of bamboo happen to originate from colder-climates, like the mountains of China. Bamboo also makes a statement, is evergreen (all year color, right?), and can be extremely functional as both a privacy screen and an ornamental piece. So it was decided, I had to have bamboo, and we wanted to screen off the water tower, the street, and the neighbors a bit. It was inevitable and got added to the design in some strategic areas: between our sliding door and the water tower, between our living room window and the street, and between our kitchen window and the neighbors.
With this decided, and a general idea for where we wanted all of our other plants - only the bamboo’s location was specific at this point - we were able to break ground. In the Spring of 2018, we did just that.
