Know your plants: Choose the right trees and shrubs
Plants play a crucial role in landscaping. The fixtures of stone, glass, wood add dimension to a landscape, but plants add the life. Choosing the right plants for a particular area and then combining it with other structures of the landscape is one of the most tedious tasks of landscape designing.
Plant categories:
The presentation is the key to landscaping. Each type of plant has a place in the scheme of things, and it must be given that due place to ensure the whole design is in-sync with building space, its personality. Following are the textbook style categories that must be added in optimum quantity to color and cover the landscape design:
Trees
Shrubs/Hedges
Vines
Ground Covers
Flowering Plants
Choosing plants:
While choosing trees for the canopy, ensure that they are not too close to the building, some trees are cause of headache than happiness when they grow tall and cover the parts of the building where you wanted a clear view or loads of sunshine. Zero in on the tree or trees. Do you want to have flowering trees or tree that just gives shade and remains evergreen, or do you want to have short trees which grow faster?
In the Fraser Valley, some of the famous trees are:
Douglas Fir
Black Hawthorn
Bigleaf Maple
Red Cedar
Sitka Spruce
Next layer is shrubs, in some cases, shrubs are also used as hedges.
There are many types of shrubs that grow in the Fraser Valley area. Flowering shrubs, evergreen shrubs, and evergreen shrubs. They can be mixed and matched to give the landscape a tapestry look at eye level all year round.
Some of the shrubs that grow easily in the Fraser Valley area are:
- Red-osier Dogwood
- Black Gooseberry
- Pacific Ninebark
- Common Snowberry
- Thimbleberry
- Black Twinberry
- Pacific Willow
- Sarcococca (sweet box)
- Daphne Odora
Similarly, vines and ground cover plants can be added to create interesting high points in the landscape presentation. Always remember, some vines can be invasive, therefore plant them wisely. Ferns and grasses provide the green cover and texture at the ground level.
Every plant has a preference level for the sun. For example, Twinberry Honeysuckle has yellow tubular flowers and grows well in shade, whereas, Evergreen Huckleberry, a shrub with Pink flowers likes to be in the partial shade, and Lewis’ mock-orange, a shrub with fragrant white flowers loves the sun!
Therefore, at East Lang Landscaping, we pay a great attention to the type of plants, the direction of the sun, for how long sun stays in one part to come up with a plant plan for the landscape design.