Garden care from Scenic Blue Design
We at Scenic Blue Design see the business of Landscape design and horticulture as an all embracing business. To generate overall harmony in the world of Landscape design, construction and horticulture, you need to know about all and their close interactions. From our very first meeting in creating a design to fit your personal wish list through to ensuring the design is professionally constructed, it is essential to make sure your new garden becomes not only a huge improvement to your lifestyle for family and friends to enjoy and create memorable times, but as of equal importance an asset to your home for future investment.
Even at the start of the design path we are thinking about the end result and how we are to make it sustainable and continually improve as the seasons roll by. Recently we launched another wing to our company covering the much needed aspects of garden care. On the surface this would appear very simple, but in reality it is a discipline which carries sophisticated science towards cultivation. We naturally incorporate many elements at design stage prior to any garden itself ever being planted out. However, at times, such elements are omitted to save on cost. Sure, in the short term this does save but when considering the investment made with quality plantings and the long term vision, this relatively small saving can turn into a larger cost. Many visualize the care and cultivation of thriving, healthy plants when they think of tending a garden, but in reality to get to this visualization, some of the most important aspects of garden care must be handled prior to any planting out. I would like to briefly cover some of these elements to try and help give you a better understanding as to when money is well spent and when it is not.
1. Drainage. In my previous career of Civil Engineering it was one of the elements which was hammered home. Drainage, drainage, drainage. The creation of an effective drainage system in and around the garden is not as easy to install as you might assume. Water can collect in the strangest of places in your garden or over fall from or to your neighbour. Either way, water often tends to flow towards cultivated areas because of the softer soils they contain, and because they may lie at a slightly lower level than the surrounding yard. One reason for plant failure is poor drainage and if the water flows to your prepared beds for reasons spoken then your new plants will fail for such reasons. Engineering a system of removing excess rainwater away from plants and flowers is not nearly as much of a challenge as concealing the work we do. We want to avoid visible pipes, grating, and any type of visible hole in the ground that would detract from the beauty of the foliage. Our planning and development team puts a great deal of care and effort into not only creating speedy methods of draining water, but also hiding the mechanisms we build to accomplish this within decorative elements that concealfunction behind ornamentation.
2. Irrigation. An equally important foundational element of garden care is the engineering of an irrigation system. As we know parts of Sydney can go for long periods during the hottest parts of the summer without any rain. Most exotic and tropical species we plant will not survive these months without an irrigation system. We strongly recommend to all of our clients that they avoid living out the postcards scenes of watering gardens with hoses. While this represents a nostalgic element of gardening, it is fantasy, and not an effective way of helping your garden grow steadily. For many reasons, one being to use a hose pipe spraying water on top of leaves makes them vulnerable to fungal growth which threatens plant health and diminishes aesthetic. Also, because of the prismatic effect that water droplets have on the leaf, this will actually intensify the heat of the sun when it shines down on plants that have been sprayed by hoses or sprinklers. Instead, it is much better to irrigate plants near the ground, under the leaves, so the water will soak directly to the roots and avoid touching the green parts of the plant.
3. Soil is another element of garden care that requires more foresight and planning than homeowners normally consider. Most of our clients who contact us for the first time already have some sort of garden that is not doing very well. We normally discover, after inspecting the plants, that the contents of the soil has played a major role in its deterioration. Many of these gardens are do-it-yourself jobs made by tilling the soil and adding store-bought fertilizers from plant shops. The problem with many of these fertilizers is they are mixed for popular species of flowering plants and may contain chemicals or lack nutrients that are better suited to the more tropical and exotic plants we tend to use in garden design planning.
It is much better to hire a team with botanical training that can first select the desired plant species, then prepare special soil and nutrient mixtures specifically mixed for the unique grouping of plants in that particular garden. Not only this, but care must also be taken to maintain the garden’s physical appearance, so the basics of clipping, weeding, and trimming that you see in even the simplest of flower beds must also be done in the more complex forms. Once again, this is something we recommend people hire a professionally trained and experienced landscaping firm to do. Not all plants can be trimmed or cut in the same way, so it is unlikely that any yard services company can guess how to safely prune each and every unique species they would find in any of our gardens. Also, many of our designs involve planting a diversity of species to create a conglomeration of colour and greenery, or to form recognizable patterns and discernable styles such as the parterre garden, the knot garden, the English garden, the Italian garden, and the Japanese garden. Care of these styles should always be done by trained professionals who understand these forms and how to best maintain their appearance as well as their vitality.
It is our belief that when the garden is even in its infancy of design it is as important to be thinking about the how the garden is going to be nurtured after the hardscape building. This we have overcome by ensuring that the team that planted the garden and knows it better than anyone else works that garden and keeps it vibrant and healthy. Regularly scheduled maintenance will also prove more cost effective than pay as you go service calls because it is included in the bundled cost of our maintenance agreement.
I hope this has helped you towards some critical elements which need to be included at the early stage of design and how they play such a huge role to the success of the garden well after our construction division has finished. We wish you fun in enjoying your garden as spring is certainly showing its head and you should be seeing your garden come alive.
Chris Slaughter
Comments (2)
julie herbert
Scenic Blue Design Pty LtdOriginal Author
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