nice ken... here's another technique....picture your happy place...(no, not from happy gilmore) then plant it........ then listen to the land... it will tell you what to move, what to add...

{{gwi:642728}}

"how did your master plan evolve"

I really had no master plan. 1-2 islands a year for 14 years. Each island built for flow to play off what I had done the previous year. Highest consideration was always given to color, flow and balance.

Last year's link below for you newbies.

Dave

New cultivars for 2012.

Cham. obtusa 'Butterball'

Cham. obtusa 'Chirimen'

Cham. pisifera 'Tsukumo'

Picea abies 'Vermont Gold'

Picea abies 'Farnsburg'

Picea engelmannii 'Blue Magoo'

Pinus parviflora 'Tanima no yuki'

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: Spring time montage

hey dave

you have a line of arbs.. that look pretty old..

didnt you start with some sight blocking.. and then perhaps work from there??? or did those come with the house???

ken

Ken

Juniperus virginiana 'Canaertii'.

I planted those in 1981 to screen the highway out of my life. A total of 14 about 6 ft. tall at the time. No intent at the time for conifer gardening. All the neighbors wanted to know what I was doing. They all walked away shaking their heads as something totally unnecessary. Now they all have their houses screened.

The screen provides a great back drop for up front plantings. Reduced highway and car noise. Great wind break. Wonderful habitat for birds and in fact even created a unique micro-climate for my yard because of the protection it provides.

Dave

My master plan was basically to add conifers quickly and make beds as fast as I could work. I wanted some asthetic value here and to remove as much of the existing weeds/grass/ugly shrubs/existing vegetation as I could and to work hard to get things done quickly, though one project at a time. I designed my gardens with three things in mind:
1. Year round-color, and LOTS of color at that
2. A collection of conifers and maples. The collections of hostas, clematis, hydrangeas, heathers, coneflowers and other rare perennials are more of a recent sideshow.
3. A garden that looked good now or in five years or less. I didn't want huge swathes of open space planning and waiting a decade or two for things to fill in, so between squeezing plants in and adding a lot of filler plants(heathers), as well as planting many conifers in places that I knew they'd be making contact in 3-5 years.

Now 3-5 years in, effectively, I am working on opening up some of the last places on my acre of land, giving some plants more space, moving some to a local botanical garden and doing some pruning to the massive deciduous tree collection I have accumulated to open up enough light for the other plants.

Longterm my goal is to shrink my plant collection in 2012 from about 4,000 plants to maybe 3,000 plants in 2017, 1,500 plants in 2022 and about 1,000 plants by 2030. I'd guess in 20 years there might be 400-500 conifers left, 100 Japanese maples, a few dozen hydrangeas, a few hundred hostas, a few dozen coneflowers and clematis and a few dozen heathers.

You know what they say though about best-laid plans...

:)

-Will

Great topic Ken! I never had a plan, I worked on one area and then kept adding more and more flowerbeds each year. I have an appreciation for color, texture and height in relation to the space. I like curves and nice smooth flowing gardens. I also, like the simple look versus a lot of clutter from figurines or too many garden statuary. I also enjoy fragrance in my gardens and have packed my gardens full of plants that have beautiful fragrance.

I do try to travel to different areas and visit every nursery in that area that I find looking for unique plants. I'm hoping one day I will get to visit some of you in my travels. :)

I think changing my gardens to more conifers and less perennials will be a big challenge because there are a lot of perennials I will not want to give up and I'm not certain I will find the right balance with conifers and some of my flowers like lilies. I want to keep them due to the intense beautiful fragrance. We shall see how it goes. I will get it all figured out eventually.

It's nice to read how each of your gardens evolved.

Will, I laughed out loud hearing of your plan to jam pack your gardens as full as possible, creating all your gardens at once so you could get instant gratification. Interesting concept. LOL

I planted a Chief Joseph and built . .. 300 plants later here I am today! LOL

Ah yes, we all have our ways!!

Dax

I lived thru first winter in house on prairie looking out at brown grass and and a few brown trees. On overcast days the sky was grayish-brown. Only thing green was a couple of Ashe Junipers in back of yard and a cactus. Shade in summer was the side of the house opposite the sun.
Started planting w/6 Eastern Red Cedar, couple of Cedar Elms, and an Arizona Cypress to have something green to look at in winter and one day some shade. Everything else just sort of filled in from there.

I spent six months developing a very detailed concept and plan.

Then one year just stripping and building the landscape structures.....excavation, leveling, retaining walls, patio slab extensions, raised beds filled, and laid lots of stack stone bed edging.

Then I spent one year bringing in all my conifers for the backbones of the gardens. I brought in trucks and orders from several places. The plan was to make it a mini collection of conifers but with lots of other interesting foliage as well.

That brings me up to last year when I lost over half of what I had planted in the record heat wave here in Oklahoma.

So now I've replanted the bones again and hoping this next spring and summer are a little kinder to me so I can move on to the smaller detail plantings to finish most of the beds.

Ultimately like most any gardeners, the best made plans evolved for me too. But without the original concept and planning, I did so many things including quite a bit of construction, I would have spent a lot more money than I did. So plans definately help.

But even with all the planning, most good gardeners can usually list of bunch of failures from which they learned how to get it right, or at least a lot better the next time.

mark

My master plan when I started:

Plant a plant you like.
Did it live? Yes-Imagine that. What might look good near it?
Did it die? Yes-Is this the first one you tried? Yes-try again
Is this the second time one died? Yes-Did you really like it? Yes-Try again.
Not worth another try? Move on to something else.

tj

In a nutshell, here's how it went down for me.

1. Buy a acre of suburban lawn. Learn quickly that grass is boring and really doesn't work in the Pac-NW.

2. Add big trees (mainly species), i.e. Sequoiadendron, Cedrus, Calocedrus, Thujopsis. Start mowing. Decide it takes too long.

3. Use lawnmower lines to carve beds among the big trees. Suddenly there's room for intermediates, i.e. Cryptomerias, some of the more common, but cool, cultivars.

4. Beds start to merge, lawn starts to become a maze of pathways. Spaces between intermediates provide opportunities for dwarf cultivars. At this point, it's starting to look put together. This is where normal people would probably stop.

5. Discover miniature conifer cultivars. Decide that they don't look right planted at the edges of beds. Must add rocks and create raised beds. Suddenly rock-garden mini-conifer nirvana is born.

6. Get to the point that you decide that you have all of the relatively common buy-able cultivars that interest you. Now it's time to search the world for the unknown cultivars that can't be bought anywhere. They can only be gotten through trading scion wood or finding your own cultivars every winter and doing your own grafting.

Where to from here? I'm not sure actually; but it's sure been fun so far.

~Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: Evolution of Glacier's End Pinetum

Dave, what a great pictorial of what you've accomplished over time. Thank you for sharing the link.