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Planting Pains
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Planting Pains

200902BZ

200902BZ

Early in the history of garden design – dating back to the earliest days of civilization in Sumeria, Egypt and China – plants took center stage in garden spaces. Terraces and hanging gardens were built not for their innate ornamental qualities, but rather to display the plants they contained. Always, the prized plant was more important than its container.

This preeminence of plant displays has been the rule rather than the exception throughout history, even up to modern times. And the passion among gardeners for new and unusual plants has never waned: Open up just about any landscape magazine, and you’ll find pages dedicated to the newest hybrids or discovered plants, and this is so because our residential and commercial clients crave new and unusual plants and unique, dramatic displays.

Based on what I’ve seen through the past 20 years or so, however, it seems that increasing numbers of landscape contractors are becoming more interested in pavers than in plants. Indeed, I see my colleagues putting significantly more effort into installing paver patios or pool decks than on the plantings that should complement them. Nowadays, in fact, it often seems that the plants are just an afterthought – a bit of greenery thrown in as a visual break without much (if any) consideration of how it all looks.

LEAST RESISTANCE

As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, I serve in a landscape-consulting role with a local township in the Rochester, N.Y., area. I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve had to speak up about haphazard, inadequate planting plans, and what I’ve run into again and again is engineering firms that don’t even have a landscape designer on staff and instead just assign the “landscape design chores” to an associate engineer.

The upshot of this is that I’ve actually reviewed plans that had trees specified for placement in the middle of the asphalt driveway – not in an island, mind you, but literally in the asphalt. This lack of consideration for proper planting design almost invariably leads to significant problems down the line.

And the problem isn’t restricted to engineering firms: The repetition of these situations through the years has led me to conclude that too many designers get so caught up in the hardscape portions of their landscapes that they fail to consider the final planting design or the consequences that follow the plants they end up selecting.

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Forsythias are wonderful plants, and I’ve never been able to understand why so many homeowners plant them where they don’t fit into any palpable plan – or why they or their maintenance contractors then insist on treating them like French poodles.

Homeowners are part of this picture as well. They’ll go to the nursery and see cute little plants in cute little containers, take them home and plant them too close together about two feet from (your choice) a walkway, the foundation or the swimming pool. They don’t ask and don’t seem to care how big those plants will get, so five years later, they find themselves spending a Saturday a month wrestling their (formerly) cute little plants into submission with hedge shears or chain saws.

In the case of homeowners, they bear blame for not having asked questions. By contrast, experts in the landscape design and installation fields have no such excuse: Incorrect plant selection results in installation of plants that don’t fare well within given climates, require more extensive watering and insecticides and, no matter the effort, never really look as good as they should.

So what do you call it when an “expert” picks the wrong plant and puts it in the wrong place? I’d call it stupidity, but there are some in the legal community who would call it negligence: There is absolutely no justification for planting a forsythia or a large-scale yew up against a pathway, staircase or foundation – unless, of course, it’s your intention to involve clients in a constant need for pruning or tempt them to alleviate the burden by shaping the plants as lollypops or bowling balls.

And if it’s not negligence, it must be intentional – and my suspicion has long been that some landscape contractors install these plants where they do as a means of selling maintenance contracts and keeping their employees busy. These employees come in once per month to “maintain” the shrubs, and the most obvious way to demonstrate steady performance of this service is to take a hedge trimmer and sculpt everything in sight into the aforementioned lollypops and bowling balls.

GETTING STEAMED

Not only is this variety of “maintenance” a colossal waste of resources and time, it also harms many of the plants and, in the case of a properly designed landscape, destroys the aesthetics carried in the original design and leads the maintenance crews to do battle against the plants’ own genetic characteristics and growth mechanisms.

A couple of years ago, for example, I designed a pocket park right in the center of the retail and commerce sector of a small local town. We scattered benches throughout the park to invite relaxation, and because the park was intended to entice the employees of local businesses out for lunch or a cup of coffee, I made certain the plan included many fragrant plants that would flower throughout the fair-weather seasons.

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This is a case where a whole lot of effort has gone into pruning a multiplicity of trees and shrubs. In attempting to inject a sense of order, however, the homeowner or maintenance contractor has ironically made a well-ordered planting plan seem disorganized, even chaotic.

As many of you doubtless know, certain plants flower at certain times of the year. Where I work in the northeast, spring-flowering plants set their flower buds the previous year. There are a few exceptions, of course, but plants that flower in May, for example, will set their buds for the next year during their summer growth period. So what happens if you cut off the buds? Well, you get no flowers the following spring.

In my pocket park, I had included lots of spring-flowering plants, among them many lilacs (the unofficial symbol of Rochester). In particular, I used a variety called Miss Kim that, in our area, grows to no more than six or seven feet tall (compared to other lilacs that grow up to 15 feet) and is much more fragrant than traditional lilacs.

In this case, the Miss Kim lilacs were placed near a bench and were to perform double duty as sources of wonderful fragrance and, collectively, as a screen around a series of air conditioning units attached to one of the buildings flanking the park.

Imagine my horror (yes, horror!) when I was driving by the park and saw a local maintenance contractor shearing the lilacs into perfectly round balls. I nearly caused an accident as I pulled over, drove onto the curb and jumped out, waving my arms and yelling at this innocent employee who had no idea who I was and had absolutely no idea why I would be yelling at him when he was simply doing what his boss had told him to do.

IN THE KNOW

With that story front and center, allow me to get to the question that underlies this discussion: Why are inexperienced and uneducated people making all these decisions?

Going back to the start of this column, why has attention to plants given way to a fascination with pavers and hardscape? Why do the engineers who do so much of the design work for our cities and towns relegate “landscape design” to second- or third-level staffers who have no real interest in plants? Why do the supposed “experts” in the landscape design and contracting fields so frequently select the wrong plants and put them in the wrong places?

Stepping past self-interested (and perhaps negligent) contractors who want to generate an annuity with maintenance work, I trace all of these problems to a lack of education.

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It’s not that I’m absolutely opposed to shapely pruning of shrubs or even to topiary treatment of suitable trees. To the contrary, my desire is for maintenance contractors to get educated so that, instead of demonstrating that they’ve done their jobs by turning plants into something they’re not, they can enable plants to thrive – and help designers preserve their intentions.

I’m the first to proclaim that what I do for a living is neither brain surgery nor rocket science, but there still is much to learn. And while we are fortunate to live in a country where you can simply print cards and be in business, there’s an unfortunate flip side is also true: We’re in a country where anyone can be in business, whether they know what they’re doing or not.

In those circumstances, it’s up to homeowners and commercial clients to do the vetting, and that’s not quite fair because the consumers of our products and services seldom know what questions to ask, which buttons to push and how to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Faced with this situation, the only way true experts can distance themselves from the field is through a constant process of education and steady production of planting plans at exceptional levels of sustainability, quality and beauty. The bottom line here is the same as it is with shoddy construction of hardscape and watershapes: The poor use of plants produces costs and aggravations that far exceed the time and energy spent in learning how to do things the right way.

Construction failures may be more dramatic and merit more attention, but the proliferation of improper planting designs (and the plants they contain) is a more consistent offense.

Let me be blunt: If you can’t find the time to get educated in these matters, in the long run it pays to retain the services of someone who has made this investment: A proper planting design will enhance a setting immeasurably for years to come – and you won’t cause accidents when you drive by and see the hedge trimmer being pulled out of the maintenance contractor’s truck.

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Bruce Zaretsky is president of Zaretsky and Associates, a landscape design/construction/consultation company in Rochester, N.Y. Nationally recognized for creative and inspiring residential landscapes, he also works with healthcare facilities, nursing homes and local municipalities in conceiving and installing healing and meditation gardens. You can reach him at [email protected].

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