Sunday, July 22

The Well-Designed Garden
Part Three: Emphasizing the positive

Create garden focal points with stellar stand-outs

Great landscapes are made up of a series of outdoor rooms that blend together to create a unified whole. Repeating some elements throughout your borders eliminates a chaotic look. Varying colors, shapes and textures keeps things interesting. And creating a few well-thought-out focal points gives your garden pizzazz and personality.

There are three distinct focal points visible from this garden path — the blue pottery birds nestled under the tree, the lakeside bench, and the tall stand of annual larkspur. All use different materials, but all draw and hold the eye. Photo by Ann Tice

Plants create focal points when you change their color, texture or form in relation to their neighbors. These accent plants should have especially strong features that allow people to pick them out and then hold their attention. The plants surrounding these accents should be subtler, helping to call attention to the focal point.

Foliage color is one of the easiest ways to create emphasis. Redleaf Japanese barberry (Berberis thunbergii var. atropurpurea) is a good example. Placing one, or an odd-numbered grouping, of these dwarf plants within a predominantly green landscape automatically captures your attention. Just be careful not to overuse colored foliage. Too many colors used in too many places confuse the eye.

Using foliage plants like the redleaf Japanese barberry, a Japanese maple or purple-leafed weigela along the entrance of your home is a good way to draw attention to the front door, the most common focal point at the front of your home.

As a rule, foliage color is longer lasting than flowers so it usually makes a better focal point, but there are a few shrubs that can hold their own in these situations. One that’s currently in bloom is the ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea (Hydrangea arborescens ‘Annabelle’). The large white flowers turn green in August and September. Planting three or five ‘Annabelles’ on both sides or on either side of the front door creates a dramatic entrance. Using a larger group (seven or nine) works well in bigger areas of the back garden. (Hydrangeas are not known for their drought tolerance, so plenty of water and afternoon shade are needed to keep these plants looking good.)

Go for shape
You can also create a focal point by introducing a plant with a different shape into your border. Rounded and horizontal plants dominate most landscapes. When you add an upright or pyramidal form, you create an automatic focal point. An upright or pyramidal boxwood planted on one or either side of the front door makes a formal statement. (Don’t make the common mistake of placing tall upright plants like junipers at the corners of your house. This draws the eye away from the area you want to emphasize — your front door.)

Plants with dramatic foliage color, like this Japanese maple, are one of the simplest ways to create a focal point in your garden. Photo/Scripps Howard News Service

If your home and landscape are less formal, you can create a softer focal point with an ornamental grass like miscanthus (Miscanthus sinensis ‘Gracillimus’). It grows four to six feet tall and three- to four-feet wide and produces beautiful burgundy seed heads in October. One will serve as a focal point when it’s planted on the inside or outside of the walk by your door. (Miscanthus, like most grasses, is not highly shade tolerant and needs at least four to five hours of direct sun to keep its upright shape.)

For larger planting areas, small ornamental trees make great focal points. Most grow 15- to 25-feet tall and wide. Site them where you can see them from your patio and through your windows and choose those that provide multi seasons of interest. One of my favorites is the amelanchier, also known as a Juneberry or serviceberry. It has attractive white flowers in April, tasty fruit in June and orange-red foliage in October. Because it’s vase-shaped, you can mass perennials underneath an amelanchier and place a bench or birdbath in front of it for additional impact.

Don’t forget that “hard” elements like a bench or birdbath can be focal points in their own right (and have the added benefit of looking good 365 days a year). Water features, arbors and object d’art can all make your garden more individualized. Just be careful not to overuse them. And whenever you create a focal point, make sure that the area you are emphasizing is worthy of the attention. You don’t want to create a focal point in front the garbage can or the compost pile.

Next week
Part four: Scale and proportion

Marcy Stewart-Pyziak teaches gardening and horticulture classes locally and at the Morton Arboretum and the Chicago Botanic Gardens. With a degree in ornamentals horticulture from the University of Illinois, this former Will County Extension horticulturist also gardens on her own 10 acres near Wilton Center.