One of the many joys of being a landscape architect is the opportunity to submerse yourself in the world of plants. At LM, we think about them a LOT! We ooh and ahh over colors, form, and texture; compare experiences growing up with them, growing them, and designing with them; discuss the merits of one plant over another; we even have an office contest this year growing different varieties of Streptocarpus.

And it’s great when our clients are just as enthusiastic! Some clients entrust us to select the entire plant palette for their projects, while others have their Dream Plant List containing many plants and varieties with meaning attached to each one. As landscape designers, we work to find the right plant for the right place AND for the right person.

I am currently working on a residential property with lake waterfront. Some of the things that make this planting design so exciting is that our client:

LOVES plants (and has a huge Dream Plant list),
wants a bold and evocative design, and
has permitting requirements that limit the species of plants we can use in a sizable portion of the garden.

With a smallish space to work in, we wanted the whole space to be one cohesive design. After meeting multiple times with our client and having many great plant conversations, we designed a planting scheme that integrates these seemingly competing garden ideas – the dramatic, lush, ornamental versus the programmatic, eco-functioning natives.

By using a series of overlapping circles as a concept, the garden design assembles the permit required plants with the Dream Plants so that together they bolster a continuous and strong graphic design while supporting a healthy environment and animal habitat. We also chose native and non-native plants that were analogous to each other and contrasted mass plantings so there is no visible separation of native/non-native.

In conversations with our client, we understood other plant considerations that are important to them:

Seasonality: plants were chosen for year-round interest, animal habitat, and pollination. We made seasonality diagrams to understand when and where we would find color, fruit, and foliage throughout the year.

2. Sentiment: some of these plants carry specific meaning from past moments in life. Color, scent, texture, and even sound of plants are all powerful memory triggers.

Talking about plants in design reveals so much more than form, color, shape. It helps define goals, solve problems, and find meaning.

Construction on this project will be happening this fall, so for now, here’s a few images of some of the plant combinations we will see coming together in the near future.

Let's Talk Plants