Entrance

By the garage is the main entrance. Visitors will enter here and the owners will admire it daily. The Bluefish fountain is slated to occupy pride of place here. Disclaimer: these photos are very crude collages designed to explore ideas. The colors are richer, the blooms more dense and larger than life.  Real plants will never look like this. Adjust your expectations accordingly for what a real garden would be like. 

Blue and Gold

This grouping comes from a garden catalog . And as with all merchandise photos, they tend to be somewhat unrealistic. I recognize some plants that will grow here, salvia, spirea, bachelor button. Some are perennial, some aren't. The salvia will bloom for several months in the summer so that would be this garden's peak time. Winter would be bare, salvia dormant, the spirea would be bare. Arum Italicum could be used to cover the ground in the winter. If the shrubs were changed to privet and lorapetalum the color could be maintained year round.

 The tree is Tea Olive.

salvia, spirea, tea olive tree
alternates: lorapetalum, privet

The following shows essentially the same garden drawn in a scale model. Comparing these two might give some idea of what to expect when looking at renderings. Ultimately the feeling of being there in the moment is what is being attempted by these drawings. They can only allude to the reality, sometimes too weakly, sometimes promising way too much.

This design follows the client's wishlist pretty closely. The specific plants are a critical issue to make it an all-season low maintenance garden.

The next two show a simplified perennial succession plan. Same tea olive and fish fountain. The first shows daffodils filling the entire space. These would flower for a couple of months at most in the early spring and remain as green leaves for another month before withering.

The second photo shows summer white daisies (could be OxEye) and black and blue salvias. These would also bloom a month or two in the summer (the salvias longer). Other succession plants could take over in the fall, shasta daisy? 

The important feature of this plan is that each successive flush is taller than the previous and cover up that pants dying leaves. Daffodils are about 12" tall. Oxeye are about 24" tall. Shasta are about 3 feet tall. Some asters are 4 feet tall. This makes for a low maintenance flower garden. 

In the winter when all the plants are dormant, one merely mows the whole bed to the ground and gives it a light cover of pine straw or the like. Now it's ready for another year of blooming. 

This is essentially an English perennial border with only a few varieties. Plants are living closely with each other for years like this, and some combinations will cohabitate better than others. It's an adjustment in each installation but as a rule of thumb, wilder plants tolerate this treatment better than domesticated nursery plants. 

This plan can be combined with shrubs and other perennials but for this description, I've kept it simple for clarity.