If you’ve ever seen yourself tilted towards the breathtaking gardens seen in shiny, attractive Instagram posts, magazines, or Pinterest boards and amazed, “How did they form? The credit goes to landscape layering.
Landscape layering involves systematically arranging a large variety of plants and making various foreground, center ground, and background sections to get a relaxed, collaborative boundary planting style.
To develop a pocket-friendly-season landscape, we can create creative design methods like scale, unstoppable conditions, and depth. Layering different plants, shrubs, trees, herbs, grasses, and climbers and intelligently placing groundcovers in different rows based on these principles differentiates exceptional gardens from the best ones.
However, if you want to use this, you have to know that it’s not as simple as it looks. It is seen that they work hard for more than 5 to 7 years to make a beautiful garden, learning knowledge from books, blogs, videos, and articles on gardening.
Following, you can read the 8-step guide and a printable planting pyramid, and make sure to not avoid any step for better results.
Can you recognize any of them?
- You love plants, but it is difficult to make your landscape visually attractive.
- Your heartbeat pops up with joy when you find a new plantation at the garden center, which compels you to add it to your basket instantly.
- While starting, your garden looks beautiful, but it instantly becomes a curled mess after a few weeks or days.
- After growing more plants, you still feel like your garden looks vacant, and instead of correcting it, it may get messy and unorganized.
To gain a bit more knowledge of layering, let’s have a look at a self-created garden pyramid for planting.
Implementing this garden pyramid is going to change your garden from looking boring to the best-looking journey. Believe it. This is the best coach to support you in developing a layered landscape that’s mesmerizing and beautiful.
Do you have a garden without any pyramids? Or do you have the same type, like lots of evergreens with minimal flowering or colors? The pyramid makes you aware of how much there is in need.
You can set up 1 tree and 3 evergreen shrubs at the peak; more than 3 shrubs are required. As you move down the pyramid, you add more of each type of plant.
A non-organized boundary or feeling of loneliness in your garden bed often results from unadded layers.
Once all the layers are set up and balanced, make sure to mix them well. These different combinations of plants will make your garden book-worthy—that’s how layer landscaping plays a role.
Fundamental Points of Landscape Layering
There are many principles of landscape design, and this topic is so interesting that a person can discuss it for so many hours.
These are the principles to use to start your journey into layering:
Let’s break down the simplified design principles:
- Repetition: Utilize a bunch of plants to implement repetition in landscape layering. You can also achieve this by sowing similar colors with different plant varieties.
- Scale: Consider the length of the plants you grow and make sure they harmonize with the area scale of the garden bed and the entire property.
- Flow: Determine how diverse areas of your landscape collaborate. We will wish for a flowy transition rather than not joining sections.
- Depth: Instead of arranging plants up, prefer them to make depth and engage interest in the landscape layering.
Let’s have a look at these points in detail.
Role of Repetition in Landscape Layering
Remembering stability in your layered garden design is difficult. Repetition can be observed again and again in certain plants, colors, or qualities. This repetition adds icing to the cake in your garden, giving it a more unified appearance and feel.
Repeat a Distinct Plant
Do you know what a mass-planted plant would look like (such as in groups of 5, 7, or 9 of the same plant)? Growing a “group” of plants is much more effective than just spreading or differentiating one plant from one place to another.
Repeat a Particular Color Popup
You can also implement repetition by choosing different plants within the same color area, like light lime, yellow, white, or even pink! The same color should be implemented again and again, even if the quality and sizes differ, producing the same effect as repeating a plant. This technique does not permit you to stay away from the landscape; it will look charming, implementing a sense of connection throughout.
Repeat a Particular Plant Specialty
Using many plants with spikes or various plant textures, or preferring several shrubs with horizontal branching structures, allows for the replication of these functions. This repetition adds to the visible appeal and development of the landscape design.
Implementing Scale in Landscape Layering
Scale is a wonderful technique in garden layering that is challenging for growing plants within your landscape. It estimates the quantity and size of plants required. By employing scale, you can find the exact plant sizes, a variety of plant sizes, and make sure the proper number of plants is proportional to the size of your landscape.
Using Correct-Size Plants
Make sure that your plants are carefully selected to cope with the availability of space once they reach the development stage. It’s essential to select accurately sized plantings for the designated area. Also, think from your mind not to space your plants too far apart either. I hope for a balance where your plants are in touch with each other, developing a dense and expensive border effect.
Indulging Plants of Different Sizes
Using a variety of plants of different sizes creates visible interest. Including a short, broad shrub with height, a small, narrow tree shows their features. Introducing Flow in Landscape Layering
When layering plants in your garden, aim to continue flowing among them and make sure garden beds blend perfectly. Proper landscape flow results involve enhancing your garden beds, diverting them away from your foundation, and seamlessly incorporating your house into the landscape design.
Introduce Your Garden Beds
Why not introduce a tree near your garden area? Instead of confining your planting areas or applying them nearly to your foundation, introduce landscape items into your garden beds.
What’s the best depth for a layered garden bed?
To increase the visibility of your landscape, prefer diverting your garden beds to at least 5–6 feet away from your house, and if possible, go deeper. Increased depth allows for more options to make layers of plantings and gives a larger variety of plant choices. If area is limited, go for small shrubs and area-saving trees, or find out ways to increase the depth of your garden beds in given areas.
Comparing and analyzing shape and scale
Use a variety of shapes, sizes, quality, and color popups to enhance the beauty of your landscape layering. Despite sharing greenery, each material has various shades. While all are conifers, they are different in height, shape, and size.
Texture is the ultimate weapon.
Creates a combination between soft and hard quality, spikes against curves, and tiny needles opposite to larger ones in your landscape pattern. The texture is a powerful weapon for both uniting groups of plants and raising individual specimens, adding depth and visible interest to your planting pattern.