How to Group the Plants in Your Landscaping

So you are looking forward to designing your own landscape? Exciting, isn't it? But maybe you are stumped over this question: Is there a rule of thumb for grouping plants together in your landscaping?

When you design your own landscape, how do you know which types of flowers and other plants go together? Is it arbitrary—dependent on how good they look together to your eye—or are there botanical reasons to take into account? The fact is, the job in front of you calls for both an artistic flair and a practical bent.

Mass Similar Plants Together

You may like a lot of different plants, but when designing your own landscape, you may not be sure how to group them. There are, of course, aesthetic considerations—one of the most basic of which is that, in planting bedding plants, you will produce a greater effect if you mass individual plants of the same type together, rather than planting them scattered about. Even in planting foundation shrubs, the rule is to plant like shrubs together in groups of three or five (even numbers can sometimes look awkward).

An Aesthetic Trick

One aesthetic trick that beginners often fail to avail themselves of is varying plant texture and plant form within the same flower border. This is because those new to gardening and landscaping tend to gravitate to flowers, mesmerized by the color that they add to the landscape. Flowers are wonderful, but they are not the final word in landscape splendor. Veteran plant growers tend to place less emphasis on blooms and come to understand how much fun it is to play with texture and form. Juxtaposing plants with contrasting textures or forms can create fascinating contrasts. 

The artistic angle may be the fun part of designing your own landscape, but you can't allow your artistic eye to be sole arbiter when it comes to site selection for your plants. There are also practical reasons for grouping certain different plants together, and for having others planted apart.

The Rule of Thumb

The rule of thumb for the practical side of designing your own landscape is to group plants with similar growing requirements together. This includes sunlight, soil and watering requirements. Grouping them together will reduce maintenance for you, saving you from dragging the garden hose around unnecessarily. Plants can "go together" if they share common ideal growing conditions:

• Need for sunshine
• Tolerance for shade
• Need or tolerance for wet soils
• Tolerance for poor soils or for clayey soils
• Resistance toward garden pests, such as deer pests
• Below-average water needs

If Drought Is a Factor

One method for grouping plants together, specifically plants that like—or do not mind—dry conditions, goes by the rather fancy name of "xeriscaping."