The use of conifers in landscape design
Recently, coniferous plants are gaining more and more popularity among landscape designers. They decorate not only alleys near office buildings, but also private houses. Conifers have earned such attention due to their character, because they are not at all whimsical in care, while maintaining a beautiful decorative appearance all year round.
However, when planting conifers, it is still necessary to adhere to certain recommendations. The correct approach to cultivation and the creation of thoughtful compositions will give the landscape design of the site an individual character and will allow you to maintain beauty with a minimum of effort.
Basic rules for the use of conifers
Before you start planting seedlings, you should pay attention to the following points:
- Visual scale... In order for bushes or trees not only to grow on the site in a chaotic manner, but to look beautiful, the distance between them and the viewing point should be twice the height of the plantings. This means that a tall (up to 5 meters) thuja requires free space within a radius of 10 meters in front of itself.
- Location relative to the cardinal points... It is recommended to plant conifers on the eastern or sealed side of the site. Then the bright sun's rays will favorably highlight the dark color of the conifers.
For landscape design of the site, it is better to use winter-hardy species.
Alternatively, conifers can be planted as a hedge around the perimeter of the site or divided into zones. Thuja and spruce are well suited for these purposes.
What's the best background?
It is recommended to sow a green lawn under tall species of conifers. In addition, groups or individual plantings look beautiful against the background of natural or artificial reservoirs... Several weeping forms of deciduous plants will only emphasize the austere beauty of thuja or cypress.
Size ratio
When creating coniferous compositions, it is necessary to take into account the height of each specimen and the size of the site itself. A tall threshing tree, spruce or pine is best left for areas with a large area. For small areas, medium-sized conifers are more suitable as the main link in the compositions. In addition to these, there is a large selection of creeping plants.
It should be borne in mind that undersized creeping conifers grow very wide in width, therefore they require a lot of space.
Plants with a clearly defined shape (ball, pyramid) are more suitable as the main element of the compositions. In the background, you can use species with a sloppy, flabby shape, and plant ground cover shrubs in front.
Creating color compositions
Coniferous compositions with multi-colored colors have a very unusual appearance. Moreover, in the case of a combination of plants of different colors in a group of three copies, there should be only two colors, and in a 5-component one - no more than 3 flowers. Large compositions consisting of 20 or more species are best divided into small groups of three plants (3 yellow, 3 green, and so on).