Increase visual impact, decrease maintenance

/

In the March episode of The Garden Show & Home with Sally Spillane, Victoria and Sally talked about ways to simplify your garden design to increase the visual impact and decrease maintenance. Incase you missed it, we thought the we’d share the key takeaways.

Victoria has a long-held design principle, “You want your garden to quiet your heart.”

Simplicity can support the feeling of calm we are all aiming for.

What’s the opposite of calm and simple?

Chaotic, messy, anxiety-inducing!

That can mean visually, but it can also mean a complicated maintenance schedule, the constant need for deadheading, or poor plant choices—shade plants forced into full-sun or wet-loving plants moved to a dry meadow, etc.

(In this dry, sunny front garden, the feeling of Zen is created with swaths of less saturated color and texture, mixed with the occasional “pop” of color to draw the eye.)

How to have a simple garden

  • Avoid buying one-offs and having a mishmash of plants

  • Buy multiples of ONE plant for BIG visual impact

  • If you have a budget, plant in phases

  • Take pictures now. Look out your window and plan what you'd like to see out there one year from now.

  • Choose the right plants for your specific property and placement.


Take note of:

Is there standing water?

Does the hose reach that spot?

Do you have morning shade or afternoon shade? Or full dun?

Do you have deer, Black walnut trees nearby, or is the garden near a road that is plowed or salted?

(You can still have variety while planting multiples!)

Find others to talk through your garden challenges. 

Ask your friends about what works for them!

Where would we be without our gardening friends? Sometimes we get stuck in our own heads and we don’t see solutions that might be obvious to someone else. But you can benefit from other people’s successes and failures. 

It’s amazing what you can fin with a few Google searches. You want to enter all of your requirements: zone, sun, wet, salt, deer resistant, Black walnut tolerant, etc. to get some idea of what your options are. 

Or… come into Victoria Gardens where we divide our nursery according to where the plant will go in your garden. At Victoria Gardens, if you have a garden that is in full sun, you won’t accidentally fall in love with a plant that needs shade.

You can look at the flowers, colors, and textures instead of squinting at the tags, trying to figure out if it will survive in your garden.

If you are browsing in the right section at Victoria Gardens, it will survive and thrive!

After 30 years of field testing varieties, we know what works.

Gardening is never really done. 

Sometimes plants outgrow they space or peter-out, or suffer in a wind storm. Or maybe as the trees on your properties grow, you have more shade.

But if you love gardening, you are always going to want to tinker! And changes can be an opportunity to try something new.