Trees, shrubs and flowers in landscape design

Every owner of a private plot dreams of having his house buried in greenery and flowers. In an effort to hide from the problems and bustle of the city in the silence of nature, we are trying to somehow organize a green space on our site, so that it pleases the eye, is convenient and useful for everyone. After all, only outside the city we can relax and be alone with nature and with ourselves.

In order for a personal plot to create a good mood, it is necessary to arrange it taking into account the compatibility of individual plants, the rules for their harmonious arrangement, and the combination of colors.

Before proceeding with the selection of plants for the garden, you need to get acquainted with their types.

Both deciduous and evergreen shrubs can help to aesthetically and attractively decorate the garden. The latter make it possible to make the site attractive not only in summer, but also in the cold season.

Evergreen shrubs can be deciduous and coniferous. In the central regions of Russia with cold winters, coniferous shrubs are most often used for landscaping, such as juniper, yew, fir, cypress, microbiota, Mugus pine, dwarf spruce, cypress, Canadian spruce.

Various types of junipers have been especially popular in landscape design lately:

• Common juniper - a large shrub with bluish prickly needles. In landscape design, columnar and dwarf forms of this shrub are usually used. The latter are perfect for decorating alpine slides, the former - for the formation of hedges. The most widespread varieties are: Green Carpet, Compressa, Repanda Sentinel.
• Juniper Cossack - the most unpretentious. It has scaly needles and grows up to one and a half meters. Its main application is the decoration of lawns and rockeries. The most popular forms are Glauca, Tamariscifolia, Variegata.

• Rock juniper has a narrow crown with a sharp arrow-shaped crown and soft blue needles. The maximum plant height is about 2.5 m. Such a shrub is most suitable for creating alleys and hedges. The most popular rocky juniper varieties are Moonglow, Blue Arrow, Blue Carpet and Blue Chip.
• Juniper chinese - a shrub with a height of up to 10 m, yellowish or greenish in color, is more often used in rock gardens or in compositions from groups of plants. Famous varieties - Olympia, Strickta, Blue Alps.

• The juniper is horizontal. This is a low-growing creeping plant. The needles can be green (Andorra Compact), yellow (Lime), gray-green (Alpina, Bar Harbor), bluish green (Ice Blue, Wiltoni), blue (Prince of Wales) or bluish-silver shades (Jade River, Gray Pearl). This type of juniper is used to decorate rocky gardens, borders and slopes.
• Juniper scaly - a slow-growing shrub with drooping, almost creeping branches. The maximum height of the shrub is 3-4 meters. Popular varieties - Meyeri, Blue Carpet, Holger, Dream Joy, Hannethorpe, Blue Swede, Blue Star. Used in the design of rock gardens.

All types of junipers are incredibly beautiful. But nevertheless, the presence of this plant will not be appropriate in every garden.

The English style also suggests the presence of this evergreen coniferous shrub, but in tall species with green or blue needles. When decorating a garden in the English style, the shrub does not act as the center of the composition (as in the Scandinavian style), but as a kind of last chord that gives the composition a finished look.

Evergreen deciduous shrubs are more often used in landscape design in areas located in a warm climatic zone, where there are no snow and frosty winters. Such plants include: camellia, rhododendron, common holly, boxwood, callistemon, bamboo, aucuba, cordilina and others.

Among the variety of ornamental shrubs, flowering and ornamental deciduous plants are distinguished. Their names speak for themselves. Beautifully flowering shrubs are distinguished by bright flowering, and decorative deciduous ones - by an interesting color of foliage. They are designed to create color spots of different shades in the landscape at different periods of time.

The queen among the flowering shrubs is the rose. The spring mood is set by pink wolf balls and yellow waterfalls of forsythia flowers. Then they are replaced by snow-white and lilac-pink avalanches of lilac, spirea, hawthorn and viburnum buldenezh.

Summer opens with the flowering of rhododendrons, tree peonies, and chubushnik. Potentilla bushes dotted with yellow, red or orange flowers create a special mood in the garden.

The summer garden design also uses mountain ash with its white panicles-inflorescences, tamarix with pink clouds of garlands of small flowers, various types and varieties of hydrangeas, colquicia and action with their lush inflorescences.

In the fall, cinquefoil and hydrangeas, roses and snowberry, budley and euonymus, red-root and pebble-tree continue to delight the eye.

Landscape designers are very fond of using decorative deciduous shrubs when decorating plots.

They deserve their special love:

• dogwood is white with its bright white-green, pink-green or yellow-green foliage;
• vesicle of yellow, crimson and purple flowers;
• barberry with bright green, golden or red-purple foliage;
• fieldfare;
• aralia;
• mahonia.

For vertical landscape design, various types of shrub vines are most often used. Among them are especially popular: wild grapes, maiden grapes, climbing rose, wisteria, climbing honeysuckle, clematis, actinidia.

A wide variety of types of trees can be used in the design of a personal plot. The main thing is that the trees are suitable for a given site in height, in their sensitivity to light and nutrients, in color and growing conditions.

Deciduous trees are the main relief spots of the site due to a pronounced skeletal axis and a spreading crown. They should be selected by:

• Crown shape.
• Foliage. Pay attention to the shape of the leaves, their size, the change in their color during the season.
• By the nature of flowering. Some trees are distinguished by the presence of large flowers (for example, magnolia), others have inconspicuous, almost imperceptible flowers (maple, mountain ash, willow), and some bloom so imperceptibly that it is difficult to say whether these trees are flowering or non-flowering (birch).
• By the time of blooming flowers. So, hazel, willow, dogwood bloom before anyone else in the garden.
• By the decorativeness of the fruit. Rowan and viburnum look especially beautiful in the landscape, which attract attention due to their bright red berries.

Fruit trees are also actively used in the formation of the garden composition. Their names are known to everyone: pear, cherry, apple, apricot, plum, sweet cherry.The benefits of planting them are obvious - in the spring they turn the home plot into a fragrant blooming cloud, and in the summer and autumn they delight the owners with delicious fruits.

And what kind of landscape design would do without conifers. They are a great addition to deciduous and fruit trees and make the garden more exotic and ornate.

When choosing conifers, you should pay attention to:

• Needle color. The color palette of these plants includes different shades of green, blue and yellow;
• The shape of the tree. It can be spherical or conical. Geometrically strict forms of these plants give the landscape a special harmony;
• The color and texture of the bark. This parameter can also add its own flavor to the general perception of the natural space around the country house;
• Aroma. Individual conifers produce essential oils with a perceptible pleasant scent. So, in the summer heat, you can inhale the pleasant aroma coming from the pine, and in the spring you can enjoy the smell of larch;
• The presence of cones. Cones also bring their own flavor to the landscape design. So, young fir trees have cones of an interesting reddish or purple color, while in fir they look up like candles on a New Year tree.

An unusual design can be created on the site using trees that are grafted on a trunk. These are small trees (usually up to 2 m), which are grown by grafting. A curly, weeping or spherical crown is grafted onto an even trunk. As a result, miniature willows, elms, pears are obtained. Plants belonging to the same genus are usually used for grafting.

Flowers are one of the most important attributes of the backyard landscape decor. Without them, the site will seem empty and lifeless. The presence of flowers that replace each other throughout the season creates a festive mood, adds color to the site.

To decorate the site, a variety of types of flowers are used: perennial and annual, tall, undersized and ground cover, shade-tolerant and light-loving, ampelous, wild, flowers with decorative foliage and others.

In landscape design, there are several options for placing trees on the site.

With this option, trees are used as a kind of fence, which must perform a number of functions: to protect the site from wind, noise, snow, the curiosity of neighbors and passers-by, to mark the boundaries of the territory, to mask unaesthetic-looking objects.

To form a hedge, trees are planted in one line at a minimum distance from each other. Deciduous trees with pyramidal dense crowns or trees whose branches begin to grow at the very bottom of the trunk (lindens, maples, poplars - Canadian and Berlin) are perfect for performing the function of a hedge.

Low hedges can be made of felt or ordinary cherries. If the size of the site allows, you can create a fence of several tiers, one of which will contain tall trees (ash, elm, basket willow, Ussuri pear, ornamental apple tree), and in the other - shrubs.

An alley is a kind of road, on both sides of which trees or shrubs are planted with a certain frequency. Trees can be planted close enough so that at the top of their crowns they intertwine with each other, forming a uniform vault.

Placing trees in the form of alleys is justified only over vast areas. On a small personal plot, planting an alley will create a feeling of chaos, since the alley will not be visible due to the lack of territory around it.

This arrangement of trees is used when a composition of several trees and shrubs is created in the garden. Plants are planted according to certain rules for combining colors, sizes and shapes.

In a group planting, the principle of longlines must be observed. If a group of plants is located near a hedge or wall, then the tallest trees are planted in the background, and the stunted ones in the foreground.

When placing the group in an open space, the tallest elements should be in the center and the tallest elements should be at the edges.

The easiest way to plant trees. But at the same time, it is necessary to be especially careful when choosing a tree, because it should be equally attractive at any time of the year. Therefore, for such plantings, ornamental plants with an unusual crown, interesting foliage color, beautiful flowers or colorful fruits are most suitable.

If the site is small, then only one tree is planted on it, which will be the center of the entire landscape composition. Spruce or common pine, oak, horse chestnut, decorative apple trees, scumpia, black poplar and others are usually used as tapeworms.

Groups of trees, shrubs and flowers should be created taking into account the rules for combining shapes, colors and sizes of plants. They can be placed in a variety of places on the site: along the fence, next to buildings, recreation areas, along paths, in open spaces.

Each composition should consist of plants of different heights, shapes and colors. But sometimes, when decorating a landscape, plants are grouped according to some one feature: for example, a composition of curb shrubs with a round crown or a group of trees of the same species, but of different ages, or a composition of various shrubs, trees and flowers of the same color (silver or red) ...

When creating compositions, trees should harmoniously correlate with the location of other plants, their size and color. When composing a group of plants, you must look at it from the side from different points of the garden.

Do not forget about the tiered placement of plants - from the highest to the lowest. On the south side, light-demanding plants are usually located.

When composing a group of plants, it is necessary to take into account the flowering time of each of its elements. This allows you to maintain the decorativeness of the composition throughout the season. And to maintain attractiveness in winter, the group should contain evergreen trees or shrubs.

The courtyard with a rocky garden is decorated in Indian style. Ornamental deciduous shrubs and various kinds of conifers emphasize the individual style of the owners of the house.

The landscaping of this courtyard is based primarily on vertical landscaping. For this, pergolas with beautifully flowering clematis vines and a hedge with geometrically regular shapes were used.

Decorated with decorative flowering shrubs, the courtyard of a private house amazes with its sophistication of colors and splendor of natural forms.

Tui, hosta, stonecrop, junipers, pines and wild grapes - everything in this courtyard is in its place. And all together they form a wonderful composition that helps to pacify and maintain peace of mind.

See the next video for more on this.