It's wintertime and living is easy-and inside if you live in Tennessee. It has been cold! So this week I thought I'd talk about something inside-garden designs. Today I'll talk about the planting diagram specifically.
When I was in advanced landscape design class the instructor gave us an assignment to do a 'planting diagram'. To me all designs were planting diagrams so I drew up the design and added all the symbols just like normal. Imagine my surprise when a few (only the professionals knew the difference between a planting design and planting diagram) of the students in the class turned in designs that had no symbols but only circles for plants? The amount of time it took to draw circles versus symbols is considerably less. I learned from that point on to draw only circles when a planting diagram was requested. To illustrate the differences between a planting diagram look at the planting diagram below. It is simple and easy to read. Now look to the next picture; which is a big picture of the same garden in the context of its surroundings; and you can notice the total differences between the two.
Generally, a planting diagram is used by the landscaper to install the plants. The landscaper doesn't usually need an artfully drawn design in order to plant the specified plants so it makes sense to draw the design for the client and a separate diagram for the client's landscaper. This is what I did in the case of this client (name and address blocked out for privacy reasons but she fully approves of my posting the designs-thanks Barbara!)
Barbara wanted a native wildflower garden on the southern edge of her driveway where runoff from the driveway tends to take away some of the soil. The area is under a large maple and white pine though some sun does reach the garden from the southwestern side. Because the majority of the plants were wildflowers in mass, if you'll look at the design above you'll see the 'balloons' so many landscape designers recommend. I did not draw each plant but instead used dots to represent the plants when massed. The shrubs are drawn out though and are toward the back of the design (top as you are looking at the photo) Each group of massed perennials was colored a different color and a heavy line was drawn around the groupings. (Note: due to the larger sized drawings the copy machine I used to duplicate the design did not have color capability or I would post the color one). On the planting diagram (first picture) the individual plants in groupings can be identified by a line drawn from the center of each plant to the next. All plants are identified by a two letter code that can be deciphered when you look at the planting schedule (list). I will talk about this particular plant schedule in Friday's posting and will post a larger picture of it so you can actually read it. You may wish to refer back to this post when Friday's posting comes out, but for now I hope you can see the big differences between a planting diagram and a planting design....
in the garden....
Words and Photos Property of In the Garden Blog Team,
In the Garden
