July is a good time to think about the first step of planning an overall home landscape: how much you can handle without getting tired of gardening.
You’ll be wise to start with the minimum—perhaps a good lawn, shade trees, and a few slow-growing evergreens for the foundation planting.
After these are doing well, you can begin to indulge in some of the delights of gardening—perhaps a bed of roses, irises, tuberous begonias, or a herb garden.
Walkways
Smooth, wide paths help to increase one’s enjoyment of garden chores. These should provide easy access to the toolhouse or another place where equipment is stored, seed-starting frames, and the compost pile.
Outdoor Outlets
If electric tools are used, outdoor outlets save precious minutes and considerable trouble and effort. In addition, three or four outdoor water faucets facilitate easy maintenance during planting times and dry weather.
Grading
One obvious aid to low maintenance is proper grading. With a steep slope, it is sometimes easier to grade the area into level terraces, stepped down with rock walls.
These may be dry rock walls, but the mowing operation can be speeded up if a smooth coping is made on the top, at the foot of the wall, and at ground level, so the mower can clip to the very edge, thus eliminating any trimming.
Trees
Trees, when well suited to their environment, present few maintenance problems. Make your choices only after studying local conditions, nursery catalogs, and books about trees. It’s also good to ask a local nursery worker for advice.
There are good trees of all sizes. Watch out for those with brittle branches, excessive or objectionable fruit, or seed that self-sow freely.
Willows send out long roots which damage sewers and drains, but you can plant them in the background away from all drainage pipes.
Elms should be planted 7’ or 8’ feet from concrete areas, as their roots grow large enough to push up concrete paths and terraces.
Maple and beech trees sometimes make it difficult for good turf to grow beneath them, but in such a case, the area could be planted with a ground cover, paved, or covered with a circular bed of small gravel held in bounds by aluminum stripping.
It is important to consider a tree’s size at maturity. Otherwise, you may find your area overcrowded or shady, or a favorite maple must be topped because it was planted too close to power lines.
Lawns
Landscape designers today plan lawns with rounded corners so that the mower can continue its forward sweep without stopping.
Where the design indicates a square corner would look best, a triangle of flagstones can be laid in that corner so that the effect is the same, but the mower can ride over the flags, and thus, trimming is eliminated.
Trimming the edges of the lawn can speed up in several ways. An electric trimmer, pushed along on a wheel, trims quickly and precisely.
Thomas Church, the famed landscape architect, recommends eliminating the need for trimming by using either permanent paving along the margins of lawns to enable the mower to cut the outside fringes of grass or by planting an edging such as Ajuga reptans that the mower cannot discourage.
Permanent pavings used successfully include flagstone, concrete, and brick.
Ground Covers
Where it would be difficult to maneuver a mower over a lawn, as on a slope or rocky land, or in areas of dense shade where grass would not grow well, use ground covers, evergreen ones like Vinca minor (periwinkle), pachysandra, and English ivy provide year-round greenery and, once established, need no care except an occasional hand picking for large debris.
Other ground covers requiring no care once established include spreading junipers like:
- Savin, Sargent, and Waukegan
- The lovely trailing Rosa wichuraiana, with abundant fragrant flowers in July, and where it can be kept in bounds
- Hall’s Japanese honeysuckle, with delightful, fragrant flowers in early June
Flagstones interplanted with thyme on partially shaded flat surfaces make a nice effect. Fieldstones interplanted with ajuga furnish a trouble-free and pleasant area under trees or on gentle slopes. Bricks or wooden blocks are attractive because of their texture.
Small-sized white gravel is being used more and more. It is the perfect answer under modern low-hanging eaves where lack of rainwater and sun make planting almost impossible.
An 18” inch strip of gravel retained by aluminum stripping keeps the area neat, eliminates weeds and splash, and permits easy access for painters and window washers.
The foundation planting can then be made just outside the overhang, where shrubs and bulbs can receive their full quota of rain and sunlight.
44659 by Rhoda S. Maxwell