The landscapes around our homes are more than just a collection of favorite shrubs and trees – they can help us meet so many more goals for our lives than that. A truly thoughtful landscape can create a beautiful setting for our home, enhancing its value and welcoming guests. A well-planned landscape can let you grow vegetables in one space while also giving kids and dogs the freedom to run and explore in another. Most importantly, a well-designed landscape can extend the boundaries of our comfortable living space, creating a ‘sense of place’ that extends well beyond the four walls of our home to include every square inch of our property.
But, a project as large as a landscape can be a little daunting for a homeowner. You’ll need a plan, and it’s sometimes hard to know where to start. That’s why we’re excited to present Landscape Planning, a seminar in our Grower’s Guide series. In this seminar, landscape designer Karen Richards and Hardy Plants expert Tom Anderson will team up to share their best tips for designing a more beautiful, functional, and enjoyable landscape around your home.
Once a clothing designer, now a landscape designer for over a decade, Karen knows a lot about the interplay of texture, color, light, and form in the creation of something beautiful. She also knows a lot about people and the roadblocks they sometimes encounter when approaching a creative project – whether it’s developing a wardrobe or a landscape plan. Karen knows that many homeowners are afraid that somehow they’ll make a mistake when making decisions about their landscapes. Erring on the side of caution, they’re often left feeling dissatisfied with the result even after all the fretting they put into it. But Karen believes that we all have it in us to identify our landscape needs and make the right choices – sometimes it just takes someone to ask the right questions, get us thinking along the right lines, and help us discover that we already know more than we think we do. That’s one of the reasons she loves to share her passion and experience with others. During the seminar, she’ll introduce key design concepts – things like form, order, and balance – and explain how she uses them when she designs a plan for her clients. She’ll also help you recognize what makes truly beautiful and functional landscapes so appealing – things like repetition, unity, and proportion – and help you apply these same principles in your own projects.
Of course, a great landscape plan will only come to life if the plants we choose are performing their best. That’s where Karen’s partner for this seminar, Hardy Plants team member Tom Anderson, comes in. Tom has a decade of experience helping customers select the perfect trees, shrubs, and perennials for their landscapes. Before joining our team, Tom was a financial planner, which at first might seem like an unusual lead-in to working with plants and landscapes. But Tom sees a lot of parallels between the two occupations. In both financial planning and landscape planning, Tom knows success is more certain if you start with clear ideas of both where you are now and what you want to accomplish in the future. For Tom, presenting a seminar allows him to explain the different questions homeowners should ask themselves when evaluating their yard and what they want to see growing there. What kind of light – bright, dappled, full-shade – does the space get during the day? What is the soil like? Are there uneven areas that will affect drainage? Is the space windy or protected? Are there problems – like unsightly views – that need to be addressed? With the answers to these and other questions in hand – along with a list of goals for the space – a trip to select the best plants becomes even more productive and enjoyable. And with the right plants thriving in the right spots, landscape plans succeed, the homeowner’s confidence grows, and design projects that once seemed so daunting become beautiful living spaces that provide years of enjoyment.
If you’d like to learn more from Karen and Tom about creating beautiful landscapes, join us on Saturday, March 17th at 10am and 2pm. Just give us a quick call at 402-496-0700 to let us know you’ll be here.
