The Well-Dressed Garden

Climate change is a worldwide reality -- a matter not just of warming temperatures and shifting patterns of precipitation, but of broad environmental transformations -- and it is also happening right in our own backyards. Smart gardening practices can help reduce its impact without compromising the pleasures of a beautiful garden.

You really don't have to give anything up to become a more effective steward of the environment on your own property. You can still grow flowers, fruits and vegetables and have family picnics on the patio -- in fact, you may enjoy these pleasures even more because climate-sensitive gardens conserve time, energy and money. Instead of mowing the lawn, dragging hoses around and fighting insect pests with expensive chemicals, you'll discover you have more time to relax and appreciate your garden.

Climate-smart gardening practices aren't radical recommendations, but sensible suggestions. Healthy trees help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and they also provide welcome shade. Planting a tree on the south or southwest side of your property will shade the house in the summertime, reducing energy bills. Deciduous trees, when they drop their leaves in fall, allow the sun's rays to warm your house in the winter.

A lawn is a thing of beauty, especially if it is set among fine trees and shrubs and attractive flower beds. According to the National Audubon Society, this combination of elements turns any backyard into an environmental haven for songbirds, which so enliven a garden. Lawns are, in fact, the least important in this environmental sense.

"A lawn doesn't support much more life than a roadway," says Doug Tallamy, an entomology professor and author of Bringing Nature Home and Nature's Best Hope, both full of inspiration for beautiful, sustainable gardens. Tallamy argues persuasively for the environmental benefits of diverse landscapes that support insects, birds and wildlife in general, and backs his recommendations with research showing how many species of insects are supported by a single oak tree, a redbud, a sycamore and many other trees.

The naturally occurring vegetation anywhere in the world, from eastern woodlands to the great western prairies and the rainforest of the Pacific Northwest -- as well as every bug that creeps and bird that sings in these environments -- is a natural and thoroughgoing manifestation of regional climatic conditions. You improve your chances as a gardener -- and those of myriad living things -- by planting native plants that have naturally evolved in the area and are thus exquisitely suited to conditions where you live.

Native plants are also high on the lists of recommendations from the National Wildlife Federation, the Association of Professional Landscape Designers and the American Society of Landscape Architects, which all have programs that advocate for sustainable, climate-smart gardening and environmental responsibility.

John Greenlee, an internationally known garden designer who specializes in ornamental grasses and meadowlike, naturalistic plantings, likes to combine showy native grasses with perennial flowers in his designs for both commercial and residential clients. Natural lawns and native grasses stabilize the ecology, he says. Flowers "are the meadow sweeteners" that make such landscapes breathtakingly beautiful.

You don't need a large property to plant a meadow. "The greatest possibility for a meadow is a front lawn," Greenlee says. Small lawns, he says, "are strange things that are meaningless," and reducing the size of a lawn -- or eliminating a high-maintenance lawn altogether -- also eliminates the need for noisy, polluting mowers, blowers and edgers.

"We can't just decorate the planet anymore," Greenlee says. "We have to fix it. We have to garden for the planet."

If you're looking for support and encouragement beyond online resources, turn to a pro. Garden designers are focusing more closely on sustainable practices than ever before. The Association of Professional Landscape Designers is working to encourage environmental responsibility in every step of the design and installation process, and following up with sustainable practices for the care and maintenance of gardens. Wildlife habitats, pollinator-friendly gardens and conservation of water and energy are all part of the organization's effort.

Sustainability is a goal, but remember, the APLD emphasizes, that getting there is a process. Take every element of a garden's design into account. Thinking ecologically about garden design naturally leads to responsible decisions about the choice of appropriate plants that thrive in your region -- without pampering and with minimal supplemental water. When you're gardening for the planet, you naturally avoid invasive species and reduce your use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides.

Climate-smart gardening isn't a lonely task or a call for a wild and unruly landscape. Lots of people are thinking and gardening this way. It's a group effort with impressive professional support, and it's the future.

SOURCES

Take advantage of the many resources available to learn more about what you can do to become a greener gardener and reduce the impact of climate change. The following organizations and individuals, among many others, are committed to doing their part, and to helping educate residential and commercial design professionals and home gardeners:

-- The National Audubon Society's website (audubon.org) is full of tips and ideas for bird-friendly gardens that help make up for the loss of habitat due to development and climate change.

-- The National Wildlife Federation's online field guides, apps and guidelines for environmentally smart gardening practices (all at nwf.org), are excellent and encouraging resources for backyard gardeners. "Although the predictions for climate change are dire, they are not inevitable," NWF says.

-- Find a garden designer through the website of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (apld.org). On the website, you can also take a look at award-winning, sustainable design projects, full of ideas adaptable to gardens everywhere, and check out the organization's best-practice recommendations.

-- Environmentally responsible design is a top priority of the American Association of Landscape Architects (asla.org). The group's Sustainability Report, and reports on native plants and diversity, are posted on the website, along with guidelines for environmentally responsible lawns, healthy soil and more.

-- John Greenlee (greenleeandassociates.com) is a garden designer and author whose meadow designs in the U.S. and around the world are known for their environmental sensitivity and great beauty. Meadows are a natural alternative to traditional lawns, he says. Greenlee is the author of "Meadows by Design" and other books on ornamental grasses, design and sustainability.

-- Doug Tallamy is a professor at the University of Delaware, an entomologist, author and expert on the relationships between humans and nature. He is a founding partner of the Home Grown National Park initiative (homegrownnationalpark.com), which encourages biodiversity in home gardens, and the author of (among other books) "Bringing Nature Home" and "Nature's Best Hope."

Plans and ambitious lists of plants are the stuff of a gardener's winter dreams. Getting it all sorted out by springtime can be a challenge, but you can take a shortcut with a preplanned garden.

Confidence is your first crop when you plant a flower garden according to a well-made plan. Expert designs, and the plants to go with them, take the guesswork out of garden layout and eliminate the exasperation of walking around the yard with a plant in your hand, not knowing quite where it should go. When you buy a preplanned garden, you'll still have to dig a few holes next spring, but you will not have to second-guess yourself.

Preplanned gardens are first and foremost designed "to help people who just don't know where to start," says Jan Boonstra Pavlinak of Bluestone Perennials, who designed 10 can't-miss perennial flower gardens for Bluestone's catalog. The company's preplanned gardens, first offered in the 1990s, came about because "it can be quite overwhelming to be faced with more than a thousand varieties of plants" in a mail-order catalog, Pavlinak says, and "we want people to have success -- to like gardening."

The elements of garden design can be intimidating even for experienced gardeners. The art of choosing and placing plants for long-term success calls for more than some experience with a color wheel. Designers put the puzzle pieces of a beautiful garden together by considering color, form and texture, and taking the mature sizes of plantings into account. They know which plants belong at the back of a border to create a backdrop or screen, and which charmers should be up front, where you can enjoy their forms and fragrances as you come and go.

Designers also have learned to steer clear of invasive garden thugs, and they have the skill and experience to choose plants that will contribute a succession of color through the gardening season.

Professionally preplanned gardens take all these things into consideration and solve a lot of existing problems, too. Plants chosen for rain-garden designs help channel and absorb stormwater; pollinator and butterfly gardens are colorful sources of nectar and food for beneficial insects. Plans for deer-resistant gardens emphasize plants that deer don't like -- so you can have a flower bed that isn't simply a buffet for beautiful but voracious wildlife.

High Country Gardens, which offers 20 preplanned designs and the plants to go with them, introduced a water-wise garden design, with 27 drought-resistant plants, in the late 1990s. "It clearly struck a chord with customers, allowing them to plant a professionally designed garden with a paint-by-numbers format," says David Salman, the company's chief horticulturist. Unlike paint-by-number pictures, these gardens are full of life.

Encouraged by success, the company started working with designer and author Lauren Springer on themed flower beds, such as one for late-summer color, and on designs to enliven the awkward "inferno strip" between the sidewalk and the street. Springer and High Country Gardens also created a series of regional flower-bed designs to attract hummingbirds and pollinators, and they collaborated with the Audubon Society on flower beds bursting with plants that provide shelter for songbirds and attract the insects they depend on to feed their young. Native plants and ornamental grasses are features of these gardens, as they are in gardens designed for High Country Gardens' sister company, American Meadows.

When you purchase a preplanned garden, the plan you receive is a bubble drawing -- a scaled representation of a rectangular, square, oval or circular flower bed on graph paper, showing the positions of plants on the ground. Mark off your bed with strings and stakes, or just with a garden hose, following the guidelines given in the drawing, and prepare the ground according to the directions. Then set each plant in place, measuring to allow growing room between plants as recommended in the instructions.

You may need to interpret the plans to fit your site and situation. "Stretch it out, curve it around -- do what you need to do," Pavlinak says, but keep in mind the conditions in your garden and do not expect sun-loving plants to thrive in shade, or vice versa.

Pay particular attention to spacing. When you stick to the recommendations on your plan, "the plants may look way too far apart, but it's one of the advantages of a preplanned garden -- it compensates for the very common desire to space plants according to their current size, instead of how they will look after two growing seasons," Salman says. Mulching around plants will keep the spaces between plants looking neat while your perennials become established. Mulch also helps control weeds and conserves moisture in the soil.

Early spring is the best time to plant preplanned gardens, to get young plants off to a good start before summer's heat sets in, but it's never too soon to consider your options. "Whether you buy a preplanned garden or not, the designs give you ideas and provide an example," Salman says. You could think of them as recipes for gardening success.

SOURCES

-- Check out preplanned garden designs from: Bluestone Perennials (bluestoneperennials.com), High Country Gardens (highcountrygardens.com), American Meadows (americanmeadows.com) and other mail-order specialists. Special prices are available on some designs with plants through the end of 2020.

-- Better Homes and Gardens also offers several garden designs (free to download) on its website, bhg.com.

Tulips, daffodils and other spring-blooming bulb flowers don't have to be big to be beautiful. Small versions of our spring favorites are prized for their bewitching, jewellike blooms, and finding a place to plant them is easy. Now's the time.

Little bulbs have all kinds of advantages. They fit in small spaces -- in a corner by the patio, or next to the front steps. They're perfect tucked in around the trunk of a big shade tree, and they're naturally suited to the front edge of a flower bed, where you can't miss them. The bulbs that produce miniature tulips, daffodils, irises, grape hyacinths, crocuses and other spring flowers are themselves usually quite small, which means they're a snap to plant with a trowel. And they're almost always inexpensive, so you can indulge yourself: When you're planting 100 of anything, you naturally feel a bit extravagant, but these little bulbs will not put much stress on your budget. The reward of a few minutes' planting this fall will be a cheerful, personable display in spring. Miniature bulb flowers have outsized charm.

The parade of spring-flowering bulbs reaches its crescendo when tulips bloom in April or May, but the show actually begins in late winter, when there's still snow on the ground, as the first snowdrops push through. They can be hard to spot from the house, but they'll give you an excuse to bundle up to go outside and look for them. The moment you see their dangling, bell-like flowers -- pure or creamy white, with just a touch of green -- is a turning point in the winter garden.

After the snowdrops bloom, crocuses are not far behind. Pools of their small goblet-shaped flowers -- rich golden yellow, purple, rosy pink, white or boldly striped with purple -- sparkle like Champagne next to a garden bench or along the front walk. They're classic bulbs for planting in a lawn, tossed here and there like wildflowers. Plant several varieties, and you'll have a show that lasts for weeks. It's fine to dig a shallow hole only a few inches deep, toss a handful in, and then simply firm the soil over the top. If they're in a spot with excellent drainage and not too much moisture in the summertime, your planting will become more beautiful every year as the flowers go to seed and multiply. Crocuses are among the very first flowers to welcome honeybees searching for pollen on sunny days late in the winter.

Mail-order bulb specialists, who are busy filling orders right now for planting this fall, carry the broadest selection, but most garden shops in fall also stock their shelves with plenty of inspiration for spring gardens. Their bulb bins are likely to include a variety of grape hyacinths, which have striking, long-lasting clusters of bead-shaped blue flowers in midspring. Miniature irises and frilly scilla are also commonly available. Go ahead and experiment with several different small bulbs to get to know them up close and see how they perform in your garden.

Mini daffodils are perhaps the sweetest of all the tiny bulb flowers. The American Daffodil Society maintains a list of almost 250 officially recognized miniature varieties, but even the ADS struggles to define exactly what mini daffodils are. Colorblends, a mail-order bulb company, steps in with a definition of its own -- mini daffodils, Colorblends says, have "relatively small flowers on proportionately smaller plants, but all are very big in the cuteness category."

The definition works: mini daffodils, with flowers sometimes no bigger than a thimble, are just about as charming as they can be. Their flower stems may be only a few inches tall, but each bloom is a perfect scaled-down version of a larger daffodil. In the garden, they're irresistible in small groups of 10 to 12 bulbs, and delightful in drifts of 100. A bouquet of these winsome little treasures in a vase will take your breath away.

Mini daffodils even have cute names: Baby Boomer, Bagatelle, Bumble Bee, Minnow, Fairy Chimes, Little Oliver, and Itsy-Bitsy-Splitsy are just a few examples.

The tiny-flower season wouldn't be complete without the flash of glorious little tulips. Small tulip varieties mainly belong to a group known as wild or botanical tulips. Some, such as Turkestanica, are species flowers, with the unruly look of wild blooms in the high mountains of central Asia. Others are hybrids with star-shaped flowers -- a little more refined, but every bit as evocative of the wilds as the species. Botanical tulips naturalize easily in rock gardens and alongside stone edging or paths. They're perfect on a slope, where they're likely to spread by seed, and they're also pretty massed in front of clipped boxwood or yews, where they lend a jaunty informality to a more tailored planting.

Little bulbs truly are mighty performers in gardens of every size and style. They don't ask for much -- just a niche -- to prove that bigger isn't always better.

SOURCES

-- Three excellent mail-order sources for little bulbs are: Colorblends, colorblends.com; Brent and Becky's, brentandbeckysbulbs.com; and John Scheepers, johnscheepers.com.