Full Sun Shrub & Mixed Borders Design

Hi, I'm Jeff Fantroba for the Yakima Area Arboretum. Thank you for visiting my garden. Today, we're gonna talk about shrub borders and mixed borders. Both of these borders that I'm gonna show you are full sun. We're gonna talk about layering of plants and how to make that work in any size garden. So if you look in this area, this is a wide border. All the way in the back, you can see the arborvitae is a backdrop. Arborvitae are a great backdrop for plants being dark green, being evergreen. They just give a nice foliar effect for things planted in front of them. If you look up here, we have a white fir, white pine, and it gets you that upper layer of the top of a bowl. So when you're thinking about this and you're looking at that, think of yourself in a bowl. You're at the bottom of the bowl and you pan around and all those trees are on the upper edge and then you come down in size until you get to the bottom where you're standing and viewing your landscape. So in this area, we have large trees. We have smaller flowering trees like Chiananthus. We have smaller evergreens. We also contrast shapes. So you have these columnar shapes. You have spreading shapes, mounded shapes. And a lot of these plants also are four-season plants. So one of them, my favorites, is this hydrangea cursifolia. It has a wonderful oak-shaped leaf. As a hydrangea, people don't realize that these are actually grown in full sun. They get beautiful fall color. They get exfoliating bark and they have a great architectural bloom. In fact, over here, you can see some of these blooms. I left them on so you guys could see what the effects are, but you can imagine these. And these start off as pink and they fade to a beautiful cream color and they look cool all year round. So the other ones, I've already deadheaded, but I wait till spring to do that. So now I'm standing in the border opposite of the one we just talked about. And you'll see some of the same repetition of form, shape, and height. So at the back of the border, this is tilia cordata or linden tree. So I also wanted to show you just the size of linden trees. A lot of times when you're in a nursery and you're looking at a tree, they're five feet tall. And so people tend to put them too close to their house or under the eave or right in the middle of their lawn. You wanna think about, again, that bull effect. And also power lines, right? We always have to be cognizant of where we're putting things in relative to our power lines that surround our house. Linden trees are a great tree. As you can see on there, they have a leaf that is shimmering almost. It has two tones to it. When they bloom, they smell fantastic. They are great for our native pollinators and even European honeybees. They have a yellow foliage when they drop, but there's just a great four season tree for your yard. And then when you look at that, to kind of bring that bull again, that side of that bull down, you have other trees in here. So you have the cornice alternifolia, golden shadows, pseudocamellia. These are actually large hydrangea paniculata. These also are full sun type of hydrangeas. And you can let them grow to a height of about eight to 10 feet. They also have a fastigiata type of magnolia called daybreak, which is one of my favorites. It's an R zone six climate. It's great because it blooms late. So typically it avoids our late season frost that we typically will have. And that will a lot of times damage the big saucer magnolias that you see around town. And again, we're also looking, remember, at texture. And so we have this truss birch, which is fine, frilly kind of a leaf with a silver lock fur right next to it. And then you repeat the silver in the brunnera, which is your perennials down towards the bottom layer of that bull. The other thing though, I know I'm talking about the bull and it's a general framework for your design, but you don't always have to abide by that. You want to sometimes put some larger things at the front of the border to give you kind of a peekaboo effect as you move around so that visually everything isn't revealed to you all at once. The other thing you want to think about is the repetition of color. So naturally our eyes go to negative space. So you can think of dark colored foliage as a negative space. So when you come into this area of my garden, you have a dark Y julia here. You repeat that here. And then on the opposite bed, you have that same repetition of those dark, those dark colored foliage plants. So really kind of draw your eye around that bull.