Plants for Modern Landscaping
Hear a landscape architect explain how he selected plants and created a planting plan for a modern landscape.
A video transcript featuring Joseph Huettl, Huettl Landscape Architecture
With the planting design here, what we wanted to do is keep a fairly regional palette, a lot of ornamental grasses. Some of these grasses will yellow up a bit in the dry season to sort of mimic the hills, and the approach we came up with was for the areas inside of the walkways and fairly adjacent to the house, we kept the planting more or less on a grid to mimic the architecture and the hardscape design. And then as we got outside of the paved areas and farther away from the house, the plants get more of a naturalistic feel. We have these sort of semi-diagonal swaths of lavenders and grasses that repeat going around, but it's a fairly naturalistic style as opposed to more of an architectural style inside.
Plant selectionsWe have several different species of grasses. We have the bluegrass, we have the Atlas fescue, we have the Elija Blue small fescue, and then we have it interspersed with some kangaroo paws which, when they're blooming seasonally, will be quite interesting. It will really play off the modern architecture.
In addition to that we have spotted a few upright manzanitas, which over time will become sculptural elements. And we also have dotted throughout a red phormium, which will sort of have a firework effect, sort of a nice emphatic point at various junctions in the path.
