The Clemson University Cooperative Extension Service offers these design principles you can keep in mind when planning your foundation plantings.
Line: In any design, where it is indoors or outdoors, line refers to the outline of shapes in a design—both the overall outline of a planting area itself, as well as the outline of major shapes within the landscape. The eye follows these lines, and their character creates a mood. Gentle, slow curves are considered restful, while jagged lines and strong verticals create tension and energy. Form: This refers to the solid shapes defines by the objects within the foundation planting. Some forms dramatic, attracting attention. Good landscape plantings, including foundations, are planned with an eye to how the shapes relate to one another within the planting area. Structure: A foundation planting, like any garden design, is built around a structure of hardscape materials and the permanent major plantings. For example, a landscape planting bed might use a short retaining wall, a ground covering of shredded bark, and a backdrop perennial evergreen shrubs as the structure around which other plantings are organized. Think of structure as the floors and walls of a planting area. Texture: The feeling or mood of a foundation planting is governed largely by the texture of the materials within the planting bed. Rough, coarse textures are seen as informal and visually dominant, while fine, smooth textures provide a more formal, elegant feeling. Good landscape designs carefully arrange and contrast the different textures. Make sure to use more than one texture to keep things interesting, and always consider how the different textures look next to one another.Color: Consider how the colors of the stone, brick, siding, and trim in your home will work with the foliage and flower colors in the foundation planting bed. Echo some of the house colors in your plant choices to create a sense of unity. Use contrasting colors where you want to create an accent or drama. Front entry foundation plantings usually use fairly simple color schemes, dominated by green. Brightly colored plants—both foliage plants and flowering plants—are used in limited numbers for drama and emphasis.Now let’s examine some different approaches to landscape plantings.
The variation in heights and colors prevent the foundation bed from becoming monotonous. The red of the barberry shrub (far left) and the gold of the false cypress (foreground) provide the color variation, while variation in height is provided by the tall arborvitae and the juniper ground cover. Simplicity combined with some variation in color and size/shape creates a very satisfying classic foundation planting. This example, with its wide expanse, can get away with having a ground cover (pachysandra) planted in behind a hedgerow of shrubs (boxwoods). Wood chip mulch offers a visual echo of the natural weathered-wood siding of the home. Raised beds and terraces can offer a good solution for foundation plantings where the home foundation is especially high. Repetition of plant material in a foundation planting creates a sense of unity. It can be difficult to predict exactly the heights that plants will achieve when mature, and shrubs that start the same size when planted may differ by many feet in a few years. Or, one shrub may succumb to the disease, leaving a lonely, out-of-place partner on the other side of the layout. In this example, the dark green spruce tree on the left is already slightly too large to serve as an effective “bookend” for its counterpart on the right. Careful, repeated pruning may be necessary to maintain the precision of symmetrical foundation plantings, and when a replacement is necessary, be prepared to pay a premium price to install a large, mature specimen to match its opposite. Symmetry is an eye-grabbing foundation planting strategy, but it is difficult to maintain. These homeowners have kept all the plantings low and at the same height to keep the attractive windows visible from the outside, as well as to preserve the view from indoors. But although the shape and size of the shrubs are somewhat monotonous, there is variety in the color, with evergreen yews providing deep greens, euonymus providing light variegated greens, and azaleas providing bronze foliage that will turn red in autumn. And the azaleas will also add colorful flowers to the display in spring. Foundation planting is a general strategy for making transitions between lawn and home, but they also can be used strategically to hide specific features. When designing a foundation planting, take your cue from the architectural style of the home, choosing shrub species, shapes, and arrangements that are consistent with the look of the residence. Foundation plantings can be designed so they are very dense—solid groupings of shrubs and other plantings with no spaces in between—or they can be designed so that there is negative space between or around the shrubs. In this example, notice how the foundation planting extends out from the main planting area in a peninsula of colorful low-growing shrubs. This design works because of the empty, negative space around this jutting segment of foundation bed. Because of the negative space, the shrubs and small Japanese maple trees closest to the viewer’s eye seem to flow out from the brick wall and into the lawn like a colorful glacier. When planning a foundation bed, make sure to consider the empty, negative space as a design element. The inclusion of flowering shrubs introduces seasonal variety into a foundation planting design that is anchored by year-round dark green colors of the yews. Good foundation plantings are often anchored by evergreen trees and shrubs, with flowering shrubs added for seasonal variety. In this example, the homeowner has chosen a white stone to cover the ground around the plants, offering a visual blend with the white siding of the house. Crushed stone and gravel “mulches” are not to everyone’s liking, but they can work well in some landscapes. Other choices include shredded wood, bark chips, cocoa-bean mulch, or even synthetic materials, such as recycled rubber mulch. Mulches can be used to create consistency with the siding materials of a home or to frame and set off the foundation shrubs. Whitestone, for example, tends to frame and highlight whatever is planted within it, while shredded wood and bark chips tend to recede into the background without drawing attention. Make sure to consider the impact of the mulch you use to surround the shrubs and trees in your foundation planting. This newly planted foundation will take a few years to reach maturity, but one day the blue-colored junipers and gold-colored false cypress (‘Gold Mops’) will help create an easy-maintenance foundation bed that still has good color variety. Strive for color variations in the foliage of your foundation shrubs. Foundation shrubs can be used many places in a landscape—wherever you want to soften the look of a man-made structure. Flowering climbers set behind foundation shrubs and trained upward on trellises create a delightful visual statement. Note that this foundation bed uses very few shrubs—it is a foundation bed for a true flower-gardening enthusiast. For flower-gardeners, the foundation beds offer a great place to pursue a beloved hobby. Spring bulbs and other flowering plants often work very effectively in foundation beds. Good plant selection can be critical in sloped foundation plantings. In this example, the foundation planting includes three layers of shrubs. A dwarf Alberta spruce is in the back row. As the tallest shrub in the foundation planting, it raises the viewer’s eye level above the middle row of shrubs. Juniper ground-cover shrubs are the perfect low plant for the outermost layer of a foundation planting. Being evergreen, their foliage will be on display year-round, except, perhaps, for when they’re blanketed by a covering of white snow. Also, note how the dwarf Alberta spruce is now nearly tall enough to screen out the electrical box on the house’s exterior. One of the functions of foundation shrubs is to perform this kind of screening. Varying the heights of shrubs and other plants is critical to successful foundation planting. While most homeowners prefer foundation plantings that have a consistently pleasant look year-round, some homeowners like to choose foundation plantings to make this kind of dramatic statement during particular seasons. For example, you might choose deciduous shrubs that “pop” with incredible October foliage color. Making a strong seasonal color statement may come at the expense of year-long elegance. But it can make your home the center of attention during the spring bloom period or fall color season. In this example, the owners flanked their chimney with hemlocks (shrub form), complemented by other foundation plants, including large rhododendrons for spring color. Unique architectural features in the home may call for unique foundation planting strategies. In this example, the homeowners have achieved a knockout foundation planting bed for spring, graced by plants such as creeping phlox, yellow alyssum, azaleas, and andromeda (Pieris). The andromeda shrubs serve double duty, providing not only spring flowers but also evergreen foliage. Foundation planting areas offer a great place for mixed garden beds anchored by traditional foundation shrubs.
