Gardening Whether north or south, this is the season to relax and contemplate the coming summer at home. Low garden maintenance is key to a leisure outdoor lifestyle, and careful plant selection and innovative equipment can free up many hours of pleasure in your home landscape. More garden leisure, less maintenance work Call it pragmatic gardening or making more with less. What is the most expedient, immediately gratifying, reasonably enduring (for several to many years) strategy that will raise the tone of your garden space without incurring large expenditures and weeks of redesign work? Answer – woody plants with colourful foliage. Using colourful trees, shrubs and conifers is a smart way to enhance garden design without adding to necessary maintenance. Trees and shrubs with vibrant foliage from spring to late autumn are attention-grabbers in a home landscape, and colourful conifers extend the interest to year-round. Their surprising colour display eliminates the need for more detailed plantings and provides diversion from a lack of formal design features. A Harlequin maple with variegated green-and-white foliage flashes as wind moves through the leaves, filling a corner where a perennial bed demanded your attention. A deep purple columnar Dawyck beech tree makes a dramatic springto-autumn statement at the corner of a house, replacing forsythia or lilac that bloomed for two weeks and then melted into green foliage. Using a hedge line of colourful shrubs in a sunny location, such as Ginger Wine ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius), makes a display of emerging orange leaves in spring, maturing to burgundy in summer, with white flowers and red berries. Dwarf trees such as the maroon ’Pinkie’ Japanese maple or vibrant ‘Blue Point’ juniper can stand by garden steps where sprawling perennials previously took up more than their allotted space. To decrease necessary garden maintenance with colourful woody plants, begin by identifying the locations where too much work is required. Consider the light in those spots, then proceed to a garden centre to select colourful shrubs and trees that will thrive in the available light. Once installed in your garden, you’ll have a finer sense of enhanced design and a colourful season ahead, with only the need for regular watering. No more deadheading spent blooms, staking tall stems, squishing aphids and tidying up plants in fall. Japanese Maple – Dwarf 'Pinkie' 44 | www.snowbirds.org
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