Garden design

Much to my surprise, this weekend I found myself doing some very design-like things with my native plants: I moved some to locations that suited me better, demoed some plants that didn't fit, planned some future strategic transplants, and so forth. This follows on the heels of my visit to the Payne Foundation and my very directed (except for one) purchases.

It's interesting to notice my style change from the wholly-acquisitive, try this and see if it works, I'll take one of those too, types of gardeners to something else. I think part of this is normal growth - I've learned enough about natives to be able to start to leverage that knowledge in another area, design. Another part of is it is driven by practical garden issues such as the fact that now my plants are approaching their mature sizes and I can see that I screwed up when I first planted them: I now HAVE to apply some design.

I imagine this is a normal progression for other gardeners too. You can throw a salvia on the internet and hit a garden blog, but it's a bit harder to find a useful garden _design_ blog. Landscape architecture is harder yet. This is probably because these disciplines require their practitioners to cross the ineffable boundary from craft to art.

I'll plan to think on the guiding principles of design a bit, but mostly get by with intuition and trial and error.

UF Extension design guidelines
Gardening Gone Wild monthly design discussion