How the Pros Create Living Art Using Curated Plantings in the South Lyon and Northville, MI Areas
Plantings are essential for an inviting, creative appearance throughout a South Lyon and Northville, MI Areas landscape, adding size, visual weight, and pops of color. Striking a balance between colors and greenery creates a pleasing palette for the entire outdoor space. From front to back, see how the pros create living are with curated plantings.
Choosing the Right Greenery
As a foundational feature, greenery serves as a backdrop to bold flowers, wispy ornamental grasses, and tall trees, making it a critical part of the plantings design. It is important to think about greenery and the color it brings to the landscape throughout the year. For example, in the doldrums of winter, looking out your window to see a blue spruce tree, an evergreen shrub, and small berries on the evergreen plants reminds you that spring will return with all the variety and lovely plantings to grace your outdoor spaces.
Thuga Giant trees keep their leaves all year, grow quickly, and are hardy in the South Lyon and Northville soil. Leyland Cypress trees carry bold green growth all year round for interest and height. Many spruce trees are blue in tone and contrast well with the lime green varieties.
Some green shrubs and trees have leaves that are tipped with white while others are a pale lime green or deep blue-green color. Like a painting, a landscape designer mixes the colors and types that work the best to form a living picture in your planting beds.
Accenting with Color
Colorful flowers add vibrancy and life to the planting beds, drawing your eyes and beckoning you to come closer to see what is producing that heavenly purple color. The pros know how to narrow down colors to those that are complementary when planted together such as red and yellow, purple and yellow, and blue, red, and yellow.
Other color combinations rely on the same color in various shades such as dark blue, medium blue, and pale blue. Another pleasing palette is to utilize various shades of white and cream so there is little color variation but the overall look is calming.
Planting Bed Layering
The size and scale of plants determines where they belong in the planting bed. Unlike pictures, the largest feature is not at the forefront but at the back to anchor the planting bed. In this way, you can still see the tall plantings when other species are positioned in front so in a sense, it is the opposite of how you see pictures.
Mid-size plantings which are often shrubs form the middle layer while the front holds seasonal flowers and ground covers that spread over the surface of the planting bed, making the space look dimensional and pleasing.
Retaining and Stacked Stone Walls
Similar to frames for pictures, low stacked stone and retaining walls can delineate the planting bed boundaries for a clear separation. The stone elevates the look of the planting beds with texture, visual weight, and some height.
Adding the same stone in layers at the planting bed edges throughout the landscape creates uniformity in the appearance, merging all the outdoor spaces together into a harmonious whole. While landscape pros know what they are doing when curating the plants, they also love to plant your favorites so your style shines through.
About the Author
Troy Clogg Landscape Associates was born in the early ’80s by Troy and friend Greg Counsell. Today, Troy Clogg Landscape Associates is one of the largest and most successful landscape and snow removal companies, offering residential and commercial clients landscape design and construction, as well as snow and ice removal for businesses throughout Southeast Michigan. Our teams bring passion to every project, along with professional service, a large fleet of equipment, cutting-edge products, and out-of-the-box thinking to meet all of your needs.