Garden Design for the Short Season Yard: Everything You Need to Know for the Chinook and Canadian Prairie Zones

By Lyndon Penner

Tired of advice for gorgeous yards that can only be created in climates like California, southern Ontario or Victoria? Author Lyndon Penner wrote Garden Design for the Short Season Yard for you, because he knows prairie gardeners face challenges no one faces in gentler climates.

Anyone can learn the basics of garden design. In this accessible guide, you’ll discover the pros’ secrets: practical ways to transform your yard using basic design principles. You can create an aesthetically pleasing yard that meets your needs, whether you want stunning curb appeal, privacy, low maintenance, or a lush retreat. You’ll develop your eye for design with Lyndon’s short critiques of gardens, both good and bad. You’ll also find worksheets to help you design your own garden.

With his signature style and wit, Lyndon delivers his expert advice for a four-season makeover for your yard.

Topics include:

• Elements of design, such as scale, balance, texture, colour and repetition.


• Choosing a theme and a focal point.


• Weather, diseases and pests.


• Low-maintenance, water-wise, and shade gardening.


• Trees, perennials, annuals and permanent garden features.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brush Education
• Release date: Mar 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781550596038

Book preview

Garden Design for the Short Season Yard

Garden Design for the Short Season Yard

Everything You Need to Know for the Chinook and Canadian Prairie Zones

LYNDON PENNER

Sagebrush

An imprint of

Copyright © 2015 Lyndon Penner

Printed and manufactured in Canada

15 16 17 18 19 5 4 3 2 1

Excerpts from this publication may be reproduced under licence from Access Copyright, or with the express written permission of Brush Education Inc., or under licence from a collective management organization in your territory. All rights are otherwise reserved, and no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, digital copying, scanning, recording, or otherwise, except as specifically authorized.

Brush Education Inc.

www.brusheducation.ca

[e-mail]

Editorial: Vanessa Young

Cover Design: Dean Pickup; Cover images all Dreamstime.com: hosta © Le-thuy Do; lavender © Andrea Haase; frangipani © Kophoto; tiger lily © Sikth; rudbeckia © Xuanmai2009; fence © Naypong

Interior Design: Carol Dragich, Dragich Design

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Penner, Lyndon, 1980-, author

Garden design for the short season yard : everything you need to know for the Chinook and Canadian prairie zones / Lyndon Penner.

Includes index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-55059-600-7 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-55059-601-4 (pdf).— ISBN 978-1-55059-602-1 (mobi).— ISBN 978-1-55059-603-8 (epub)

1. Gardens—Prairie Provinces—Design. 2. Gardening—Prairie Provinces. I. Title.

SB453.3.C2P45517 2015 635.909712 C2014-908349-1 C2014-908350-5

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Dedication

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This book is for everyone who ever wished for a map that would lead them into places of wonder and beauty. I hope this book will be that map. My wish is that you find the heart of the garden, and in so doing you will find your own heart.

Table of Contents

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Introduction

Section One: Practical Considerations

Chapter 1: Before you begin

Passion in gardening

Deliberate gardening

Finding your inspiration

In this book we will…

Chapter 2: Building expectations

Learning garden design

Do you want a personal or a professional garden?

A garden over time

Taking risks

Chapter 3: Garden structure

Permanent features

Perennials

Annuals

Chapter 4: Space analysis: What’s there now and how can I use it better?

Analyze existing plants

Analyze existing conditions

Analyzing your lighting

Planning around weather

Chapter 5: Designing for life

Disease

Pests

Prevention

Pets

Section Two: Design Considerations

Chapter 6: Design trends

Garden magazines are misleading

Suggested swaps for popular tender perennials

Gardening advice

Getting stuck in someone else’s vision

Chapter 7: Themes: Gardening with purpose

Chapter 8: Basic elements of design

Lines and curves

Scale

Pattern and repetition

Variety

Rhythm and unity

Balance

Surprise

Movement

Chapter 9: Creating negative space

Groundcovers

Annual groundcovers

Rocks

Chapter 10: Focal points

Birdbaths

Fountains

Special trees or shrubs

Perennials

Rocks

Pottery

Framing a view

The house

Trellises and arbours

Statuary and sculpture

Furniture

Ponds

Dry streambeds

Chapter 11: Colour

Chromatics

Colours and emotion

Working with colour in your garden

Colour echo

Colour contrast

Colour inspiration

Common colour errors

Chapter 12: Beyond the basic elements

Planting quantities

Massing

Blurring

Underplanting

Texture

Look beyond flowers

Bark

Fruits and berries

Section Three: Drafting Your Design

Chapter 13: Getting started

Choosing plants for your garden

Special considerations when choosing plants

Choosing the right tree

Chapter 14: Planning is done: Let’s plant!

Removing lawn

Planting the beds

Caring for seedlings

Mulch

Adding plants

Section Four: Developing Your Inner Designer

Chapter 15: Short critiques

Chapter 16: Detailed consultation

Appendix: Terminology and Worksheets

Decoding horticulture jobs

Basic landscaping terminology

Worksheets

Acknowledgements

Photo Credits

Index

Introduction

Landscape design explores the use of trees, shrubs, perennials, and annuals to create pleasing and functional outdoor spaces. Design techniques are the result of good use of suitable plant material for the site, one’s own design experience, climate, and personal taste.

That sounds like one of the dusty old horticultural textbooks that sits on my bookshelf. It also sounds tremendously boring if you ask me, but the truth is that landscape design is anything but boring. There is an added dimension of risk and gamble if you live on the Canadian prairie, as I do.

Lyndon Penner comes from a long line of prairie gardeners and has great passion for the land and great pride in his work. He has created gardens on three continents and never tires of flowers and trees.

It’s all very well and good to know what a peony requires to be happy, or the best way to grow roses, or that carnations make good cut flowers. Facts about plants and flowers can be learned by anyone who has the time and interest, but what do you put that rose next to is often the better question. No plant exists in a vacuum, and yet most of our prairie gardens are random and hodge-podge collections of either plants that happened to be on sale or plants we happen to like, and the resulting gardens are usually colourful but haphazard and incoherent.

I love this! The house and the garden are perfectly in sync with each other. There is a rich assortment of colours, shapes, and sizes, and the garden has a slightly wild, though not uncontrolled look about it. It is attractive and colourful without being too colourful. I think this could be improved a bit if the plants were allowed spill over and hide the harsh line of the sidewalk—it’s very visible and austere. This garden is in British Columbia, but this is easily a design style you can do here if you swap out the climbing hydrangea on the side of the house for Clematis macropetala or perhaps even hops.

In this book, we are going to start by examining some of the practical considerations you’ll have to think about to design your garden, and from there we’ll move on to inspiration, expectations, and risks. Are you excited yet?

I’ll teach you about the bones of the garden and creating a sense of permanence, we’ll look at ways to analyze your space (and thus use it wisely), and of course, we’ll also have to explore topics such as soil and sun, shade and weather, and all those pesky matters like death and disease and critters that will eat your plants and critters that will hopefully eat, well, the other critters.

By about the middle of the book we’ll be looking at trends and fashions in gardening; there will be much ado about trees and shrubs, and I’ll even take you through grass and groundcovers. Rocks, focal points, ponds . . . it’s all in here! Colour, texture, bark, and berries rounds out the back of the book, followed by some (hopefully very helpful) worksheets that can help you along the way.

A garden is always a journey—ever changing, ever evolving, and never finished. Ask any gardener about their yard and they will say, You should have been here last week when the lilies were in full bloom or Come next week when the lilacs are in flower. Real gardeners are never satisfied. There is always a hunger and a thirst for bigger and better things. I want to help you realize your vision for your garden, and my hope is that with this book, I’ll be able to do just that.

SECTION ONE

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Practical Considerations

Monkshood is an old-fashioned perennial that blooms over a long period and is rarely (if ever) troubled by pests or disease. It makes a great cut flower but is also highly poisonous.

1

Before you begin

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If you picked up this book, it means you’ve got a vision that your garden can be something more than a collection of plants. I’m going to teach you about colour and focal points and texture and good things like that, but first we have to be realistic about where we live. Chances are good that this isn’t the first time you’ve looked at a book on garden design. Maybe you’ve even gone home, tried some things out, and made a genuine effort to come up with something beautiful. We’ve all felt the ocean of disappointment after doing everything correctly but finding a reality that differs greatly from the vision. Lots of people give up after that and don’t try again.

Well, if you tried to design something grand and you failed, it probably wasn’t your fault. You probably very innocently picked up a book from a well-known writer, quite likely featuring a picture of him or her smiling in an immaculate garden on the back cover, took it home and did what they told you, and things went completely sideways. That smiling (smug, even) writer was probably somewhere in Vancouver or Toronto or England.

Lupines, grasses, and three-flowered avens combine to create this beautiful scene in Waterton Lakes National Park. I have used all three of these plants in landscape designs; my best inspiration always comes from nature.

In these sorts of places, gardeners have no idea what wind or hail or cold actually is. They have no idea what a hot, dry wind can do in summer or what a chinook wind can do in January. They don’t have to deal with heavy, clay soil and a growing season where you can easily have just eighty frost-free days—and that’s if you’re lucky. Then there’s pests and diseases and garden centres selling you things that were never intended for your climate and saying, You’ll do fine! Frankly, it’s amazing that anyone here even bothers gardening at all.

Garden design is like most things in life—anyone with an interest and willingness to commit can learn and become good at it. You don’t have to go to school and get a horticulture degree to create a fabulous garden. It is comparable to you being able to change the oil in your car without having to go to school and become a mechanic.

I can teach you enough in this book that you should be able to go forth and boldly create something beautiful, which the world desperately needs, and you should be able to do it in our prairie climate. This last part is absolutely critical; if you design a beautiful garden for a Vancouver climate and you live in Regina, you are going to have problems. I’d like for you to avoid problems.

So to you, dear homeowner and potential garden designer, I advise this. Plants are expensive; don’t throw perfectly good money away. Choose your plants wisely—the right plant in the right place is going to stay healthy with very little work, whereas you’ll constantly be providing life support to a poor choice. Research and educate yourself. Don’t think short term; don’t put a shrub or a perennial in if you won’t be there to look after it. Don’t put something in that will be a problem for the person who inherits the yard after you. Be inspired. Take some risks. Have fun! Together, we will walk through the considerations you need to make when designing your own beautiful garden and then I’ll point you in the right direction for choosing the best plants for our harsh prairie climate.

Many gardeners prefer the simplicity and elegance of the single-flowered peonies to the old-fashioned, double-flowered forms.

Passion in gardening

This is a book about design, and to design well, you need to be inspired. What is more inspiring than your own garden? Gardens are spiritual places, and they should be treated as such—a garden is sacred. The basis of any good garden design is a love of plants. If I went to art school, I could learn to paint. I could learn all the great masters through time, learn to recognize their work, and learn all the techniques I need to paint a picture. Yet if I never learn to love art, if I never learn to be passionate about the creative process and the act of putting a painting together, my work will never be as good as someone who has a fire in the belly and paints because he or she must!

To garden like a master, to make art with plants, requires passion.

If you are looking for an easy fix, a magic wand, a beautiful garden with absolutely minimal effort, you will lose. A half-hearted attempt will yield (at best) half-hearted results. But gardening requires not so much discipline as it requires devotion. There is a vast difference between the two. Be passionate about your garden! Passion draws people—both other gardeners and non-gardeners alike. When you have a deep love for something, it is like a beacon and it draws people.

I love gardening and plants with all my heart and soul and it shows. When I write, when I speak at a gardening conference, when I help someone create a garden, one of the comments I often hear is that I’m so into this, and so passionate about it. This is true, and like any artist, you must be passionate about gardening to excel at it. A garden that is the recipient of passionate love will always be a great garden.

I’d like to say you get out of it what you put into it, but that isn’t exactly true. My garden has rewarded me ten times over for every bit of effort I put in. Those rewards are because I have devoted myself to my garden. I get on my hands and knees and pull weeds. I don’t fart around with landscape fabric or other such nonsense, nor do I want some sort of spray to do my work for me—they typically cause more problems than they solve anyhow. I work for my garden. I have cried over it, languished over it, celebrated it, exalted it, and done everything in my power to help it succeed.

Every garden I have ever visited that was rich and vibrant and full of life has been birthed by a person who saw a plot of earth and dreamed about the potential it held, and then acted on that potential.

I’ve never been to a magnificent garden where the gardener did not know the names of the plants or did not know the stories those plants told.

Deliberate gardening

A beautiful garden requires deliberate choices, not a haphazard circumstance. Adding every interesting plant you see in the greenhouse will not improve your design. It will be your task as a gardener to make decisions that are true to your vision and to keep things under control.

A garden also requires care. It needs someone to pull the weeds and do the watering and keep more vigorous competitors under control.

The trick in gardening, especially with a perennial border, is to gently guide your plants into a state where they appear natural and not needing guiding. This is not one sided, either, because the plants are bound to teach you lessons and things will not always go as you planned. Plants do unexpected and surprising things sometimes, and this can be wonderful. You will also acquire plants with no inkling as to where they came from. A saskatoon berry came up in the garden next to the mugho pine; I didn’t plant it there but likely one of the birds did. My mother has a golden elder in a nice location beside the deck; that was also a surprise that showed up as an unplanned seedling. Sometimes this is serendipity; sometimes it is not. Don’t feel obligated to keep every plant that wanders in. It’s perfectly acceptable, and often necessary, to evict plants that aren’t working with what you envision your garden to become. But how do you develop this vision? First you need to find your direction.

Finding your inspiration

Many of us, when faced with the daunting task of creating a garden, aren’t sure what we want to accomplish. There are so many possibilities that it can be overwhelming and a bit frightening. Where do I turn for inspiration? Usually I go to the mountains. I am close enough to the Rockies that it’s not hard for me to get away and get on a slope somewhere and look at what’s going on botanically and pull inspiration from that.

We all have our places we can go—the beautiful forests of northern Canada, our many provincial and national parks, and sometimes as close as just down the street. All of us have a favourite garden or yard that we like to drive by or a favourite public garden that we like to visit. We also have gardeners who inspire us and draw us into this fascinating world of foliage and flowers. Maybe you have a parent or grandparent who loves gardening, or perhaps a much-loved aunt or even a neighbour.

The Reader Rock Garden in Calgary is a provincial historical site and one of the most inspirational prairie gardens I’m aware of.

You can also draw inspiration from history and from the library. I have been inspired by many of the great British gardeners and plant hunters down through the ages by reading what they had to say and looking at the situations they were faced with and how they planted accordingly. Gertrude Jekyl had been dead for many years by the time I arrived on this planet, but the books she wrote and the gardens she created are largely still here, leaving me to gather up her wisdom and benefit from it. There are certainly others as well.

Christopher Lloyd (the great British gardener—not the American actor from the Back to the Future movies) passed away much more recently, in 2006. He was that rare character who knew and loved plants and was a gifted and extraordinary writer. He was also outrageously opinionated, even to the point of being controversial. I often read his books when I am faced with the challenge of a particularly troublesome design issue or some sort of peculiar plant question.

It’s always a good idea to have both your notebook and your camera along when you find yourself in a place that inspires you so you can record your observations and ideas. Use these ideas to put together a little journal that you can turn to when you are starting a new creative venture in the garden. Sometimes a photo along with a small note to yourself is very helpful to refresh the memory, and your comments should link to why you were inspired or how you would like to use the inspiration. Could I re-create this in miniature? you might ask after observing a sweeping bank of woodland perennials. Joepye weed grows with anise hyssop in the wild and they look great together—a good pairing in the cottage garden.

Sometimes it’s just an observation, not necessarily a full-on idea: butterflies are plentiful in the pasture this year. It is often, however, sharp observations that lead to ideas. In this case, you might start wondering why the butterflies are so abundant. Maybe there has been more moisture this year, leading to a heavier-than-normal bloom of wildflowers. Or maybe you find out there are new landowners, and they have discontinued the previous landowner’s tradition of pesticides. That’s where you might say, "In the wild, I’ve noticed that moist, sheltered spots free of pesticides are perfect environments for butterflies. I could totally do this in my own garden! Sometimes you get a jolt where you say, I would never have thought to combine those two colours, but they look absolutely great together in Aunt Margaret’s garden. Must try that at home." Capture these fleeting thoughts in a way you could use that colour pairing, maybe even with different plants. Inspiration comes often when we least expect it, and we need to be ready to write and record details so we can use them later on.

The Rocky Mountains provide me with some of my best inspiration for garden design. When people tell me I need to go to Ontario for fall colour, I tell them they’re wrong. I am always trying to plant for fall colour in gardens that matches what I see in the wild.

In this book we will . . .

I like to keep things as simple as possible. I find that a lot of garden design books want to make gardening into rocket science when it isn’t. I also think over-complicating things puts a lot of people off gardening, and that isn’t right. So let’s break garden design down into a few easy steps, shall we? We will go into each step in much more detail, and later in the book you will find worksheets to walk you through each one, but for now, here is a map of where we are going.

1. Analyze your space. What is the starting point of your garden design? Do you have any special needs, such as a play area for children? Is water accessible?