The 7 Worst Mistakes In Landscape Design

On this channel we spend a lot of time talking about soil health, plant health and how to make your landscape thrive. But healthy plants are only a part of what makes a garden beautiful. After 47 years as a landscape architect, I see some mistakes over and over that make a yard feel cluttered, awkward or less attractive than it could be. So today we're covering the seven Starting with landscapes that just kind of run together, nothing distinguishing about it. Aesthetically, it's nice to have something that gets your attention and something that the whole landscape is kind of set up around. We call those focal points. When you're designing your landscape, Chip and I feel it's important to have this in mind about certain areas that are special visually and that can be created by a tree or a grove of trees or sculpture or pots. In our case, I'm at our front landscape here, my new house, and we used spectacular architectural pottery, cobalt blue pots with dwarf citrus in them. We're going to let the dwarf citrus get a little bushier and fill up those pots and then around them we're going to have a ground cover that kind of looks like a lawn called carapia and that'll fill out what looks like now a bunch of bark. And so this is along the main entry. This is very visible from the street and it is a focal point of interest. In the back we have actually several focal points. I might have overloaded on focal points, but the main obvious one when you walk in that backyard is a 75 foot long lap pool made to look more like a water feature. That's a very large focal point that then you work around it. We have a couple of mini focal points on either side of it. One's an arbor that's going to have vines growing on top of it for shade and then we have what is almost exclusively an aesthetic little trellis or arbor on the opposite side of the pool that we'll show you that kind of has an Asian look to it. I don't think it's the first thing you're going to think about but it is something as you begin to create your spaces that you consider how you can make them one or more of them stand out with some type of focal point. Working in a focal point is important but a mistake that many homeowners make is thinking more equals better. So you can definitely have a more than one focal point but the focal points need to be framed around a unified landscape. For instance on either side of the walkway leading to the main entry to the house we have little ragu bays which is a dwarf bay shrub. So it's the same plant all along the walkway very simple and unified. Either side of the main entrance even though one's bigger than the other because we planted them at different times we have two dwarf ginkgos. So you see the idea here is very unified plantings on either side of the walkways and in large parts of the landscape. The whole focal point of the front landscape is these four navel oranges. Now if we were to make that four different trees that would be kind of a visual busy mess. We're trying to be bold, compelling, simple and yet still with a lot of interest. A landscape can have plenty of great plants and features but still feel chaotic. Let me ask you a question. How many times have you considered how your landscape is viewed? It's far more important than you think and when you look at skillfully done designs it's paramount to the construction of them. So sight lines are related to focal points and mystery and they all kind of work together. A garden or a landscape without sight lines means there's no consideration of important really attractive things to look at and ways that you want to highlight your landscape. Things that you want people to look at. This landscape here is all about sight lines. You can see from the front we developed this sight line that goes right down the middle of the pool and starts in the front yard. When you can hardly see the pool you can just get hints of it. So there you're creating this feeling of mystery. You want to know what's in the back and you get a sense of what's in the back but you'd be very curious to walk through the gate and look at the back because you're enticed by what you see by the sight line. We have a tree right at the end of a sight line because our pool is long and narrow and you're going to look down the entire length of it and way in the back behind it we've got a spectacular tall autumn gold ginkgo which will have great fall color and be a really interesting focal point at the end of a sight line. We're in the process of building this so we'll be screening out some of the parts we don't want you to notice as part of the sight lines. And then we've got another interesting sight line. We've got a big lawn in the back that's just dirt right now but as you look down the lawn you see a courtyard that's going to have furniture right now it just has pots. This landscape is all about sight lines. Along with sight lines goes focal points and mystery and that makes a landscape interesting. The idea of mystery is well demonstrated by this little landscape we did that has quite a few Japanese maples very small garden. I have gotten some comments from people say you can't do mystery you know my yard's not big enough well this is a very tiny little yard and mystery is a big part of it because the walk was designed in a way that you don't really know exactly what you're going to see when you turn the corner. This next one has less to do with what you see and more to do with how you experience the space and the landscape. If your landscape feels off and you can't quite put your finger on what it is and why it's off I just might have the answer. Keep watching. So there's lots of mistakes that can go wrong with circulation. The most common ones are being so creative that it doesn't really create the most convenient way to get from space to space and so you end up with people cutting across the landscape and ignoring the intended circulation. And also circulation that isn't creative enough where you don't experience the landscape in some way. In the front from the street we have like a double walkway and you can take either one that leads you to the main gate. In the middle of that walkway in terms of being interactive is one of the most spectacular focal points in the whole garden with those three pots. And then as you enter the gate it's very direct and yet still interesting because you have all of these interactive elements on either side of you. A lap pool and planting. The circulation and the line of sight and the focal points they're all related. This circulation is extremely functional because it goes all the way around the house and connects to the driveway at both ends. Really a great example of a circulation system that is extremely functional and yet interactive. So maybe the most important feeling from circulation is that it's intuitive. You're not going to have people cutting across the wrong areas because it's clear where you're supposed to walk and where you're supposed to walk is convenient and direct. If you've ever built a walkway only to watch people cut across the lawn anyway then subscribe it's free. The next mistake is easy to overlook because it's so so common. But once you notice it you'll start seeing it everywhere. Seems like the simplest most default landscape design I see and probably you see is just making a planter around the house. For some reason people want to cover up their house that used to be a legitimate goal because house foundations were unattractive. But now house foundations aren't unattractive so planting right up next to them just creates maintenance issues down the road and isn't the best way to create space. I try to get away from foundation planting entirely. You'll see here many parts of the house we don't even have plants. But I do have what's essentially a basement area so I'm sensitive to putting water right up next to the house making the windows very accessible for cleaning. Around most of the house I have these cobble areas mixed with four to eight inch river rock and Mexican cobble. No water, no irrigation, very simple. Then outside of those areas we have dense planting so we're not looking arid or anything. Be aware of a new time, a new dimension, a new way to think about landscape design where you're not just coming up with big broad expanses of lawn and little planting beds around the house. The next point might be, I think is, one of the most overlooked principles in landscape design and yet it has the most important impact on how your landscape looks and feels and functions. Sometimes you might recognize landscapes that are just about ornamentation. They have pretty plants, they have maybe a lot of lawn or a lot of rock, but the elements are not situated in a way for your use and for improving your life and that really is what landscape architecture is all about, creating space. The great challenge for the garden designer shouldn't be to make the garden look natural but to make the garden so the people in it will feel natural. That's from Lawrence Halperin and that's all about building gardens with spaces that maybe extend your house out into your landscape, that are maybe made for you to take a nap. In this landscape we recognize that by creating all kinds of space. The space I'm sitting in which is an extension of the family room with double doors out into the landscape. The pool itself is one big space. We have a courtyard in the front, a courtyard in the back, a courtyard on the side yard, a lawn area. I'd say the first thing that's in the creation of a good landscape design is identify the uses in your landscapes that you know you need and you want. Then we try to link those spaces with, as we've already mentioned, focal points and proper circulation. I saved what I consider to be the biggest mistake of all for last. It's incredibly common, not usually attractive, and once you recognize it you'll wonder why so many people do it. Foundation planting is planting that envelops the house instead of revealing the house and at this house I think it's a classic example of a house we want to reveal because the architecture is so spectacular. This is what I would encourage you to avoid. Don't do planting that envelops the house. Allow the house to be seen not only from the front but the back and maybe there's a spot here and there where you could just have a Japanese maple or you know there's things that you can put outside of the window to make a nice view out and there's nothing wrong with that. We have one small area right behind me that demonstrates how you envelop a house but I had a reason to do it. I used bamboo to envelop the house in this one isolated area because that is the master bathroom and it has big windows and at night you can look in from the outside so we screened it with bamboo and bamboo is good with the theme of the architecture and the theme of the house. It's also good because that's just like a year and a half of growth so grew very fast. Now we'll have to control it a little although in that case we are covering the architecture of the house but it's just directly in front of the master bathroom window. Now envision that all around the house and contrast it to what we did instead all around the house. If you have that all around the house whether it's bamboo or another plant they get too big and so then the only thing you can think of to do or your gardener can think of to do is use a hedge trimmer to club them into submission remembering shapes from geometry that still cover the house and don't allow you to appreciate the natural form of the plant because now you've clubbed it into submission. You can design your landscape to look amazing but that doesn't mean all your work is done. There's still a lot that can go wrong even when the design looks great. For example can you tell what's wrong with the mulch on the screen right here? Because many many people make this mistake every single day and Chip doesn't like it. Click on the screen and I'll tell you about it in that video.