What’s Your Landscape Vibe?

If your landscape designer asked you, “What’s your vibe? How do you roll?” what would you think?

Maybe, “Oh gosh, I wasn’t expecting that question.”

Or maybe you would wonder what in the world that has to do with choosing plants.

But what if it has almost everything to do with it?

When you decide to paint your house, you might say, “Let’s just paint it the same color.” Or maybe, “I want something different.” More traditional. Less traditional. Brighter. Quieter. Or perhaps the very honest answer is, “I have no idea. We just need to paint the house.”

Landscapes can be the same way.

You know you want something different, but what exactly is different?

Someone might tell me, “I want my own Denver Botanic Gardens.”

Okay. Great.

Which part?

Do you want the xeric plantings and crevice gardens toward the back? Do you love the Japanese Garden, with all those different evergreens and water? Do you want flowers everywhere, without yet thinking about how much work all those flowers will require?

Or maybe what you really remember are the pathways.

Now we are getting somewhere.

What Does “Classy” Mean?

I hear things like, “I want a master plan.”

Sure. That sounds good.

But what does that mean to you?

Here’s another one: “I want it to be classy.”

And what does classy look like?

Make it even more interesting: “I want it to be xeric and classy.”

Can those two things exist together?

Absolutely.

But we still have to figure out what your version of xeric and classy looks like.

Someone else might say, “I want it to flow.”

For me, that could mean grasses moving in the wind. I love movement in a landscape.

But what if there isn’t any wind?

Can we still create movement?

I think so.

Different plants, shapes, textures and colors can lead your eye from one part of the landscape to another. One area connects naturally to the next. It flows almost like a conversation with someone you like, where neither person is working very hard to keep it going.

That is very different from simply saying, “I want some grasses over there.”

Sometimes We’re Really Planting a Memory

Then there are the plants we remember.

“I want lilacs. My parents had lilacs.”

Or maybe it was your grandparents.

Now we aren’t just talking about a shrub anymore. We are bringing something from the past into the future.

There is comfort in that.

But I might still ask, “Are you willing to look at something else?”

Lilacs in Colorado can develop powdery mildew later in the summer. It usually isn’t hurting the plant, but when I look at it, I think, “Something is wrong.”

You might not care.

You might say, “John, I want my lilacs.”

Great. Let’s find a place for your lilacs.

But at least now we know why they matter.

Show Me What You Mean

What your landscape designer really wants is something we can work with.

Think about telling a realtor, “I want to sell my house.”

Okay.

When?

“One day.”

That conversation doesn’t have much possibility in it.

Now say, “We want to sell because the house is becoming too much to manage. We want something smaller, but we still want enough room for our children to come home and stay with us.”

Ah.

Now I can see something.

Landscapes work the same way.

Find a photograph you love.

Then don’t just show it to me.

Tell me what you see.

Is it all the flowers?

The quiet?

The way a path disappears around a corner?

The shade?

The colors?

Maybe it is something you cannot name immediately, which is fine too. We can keep looking until we figure it out.

Monet’s Garden Was Too Much

I had always wanted to see Monet’s Garden.

The pictures of the dahlias were beautiful, and I had this idea of what it was going to be like.

Then I got there.

It was beautiful.

And almost immediately, I thought, this is a lot.

Flowers and plants everywhere.

I was very glad this was not my problem to manage every day.

Funny, isn’t it?

Something I had admired in photographs was not necessarily something I wanted to live with.

Instead, I found myself looking for the pathways.

I love pathways where you cannot see everything at once.

Where are we going?

What is around that corner?

Is there shade ahead?

Another favorite pathway of mine is through Muir Woods. The trees are so enormous that eventually you

almost give up trying to look all the way to the top. Then you start noticing how quiet everything is.

All those textures.

Leaf shapes.

Different greens.

The way the forest seems to absorb sound.

That is much closer to how I would describe what I want from a landscape.

I want a pathway that takes me somewhere.

I want new colors and shapes to appear as I move through it.

Dappled shade.

A little sunny spot.

Cool noo

ks and crannies.

And then, look.

There’s a hummingbird hovering over a plant I hadn’t noticed before.

So when I ask, “What’s your vibe?” I’m not trying to make the conversation more complicated.

I’m trying to find out what you actually want to experience. The plants come after that.