Choosing Shrubs For A Dry Climate Garden ? How To Think Like A Professional Designer
Understanding the design function of landscaping shrubs can help you make wiser choices when planning your garden, or adding some plants to an existing border.
When choosing which shrubs to include in your garden, your starting point may be based on your favorite likes and dislikes. As counter intuitive as it may sound, this approach is mistaken. Instead, you can think like a professional garden designer, by allotting a specific design role to each element in the garden, including the landscape shrubs and bushes.
Turf Irrigation ? How To Save Water And Your Lawn During Drought Years
In principle, the best way to save water in dry climate gardens is to reduce the area of grass. Here is a way of saving water in drought years, without killing-off the lawn.
In climates that have long, hot, dry summers, the turf varieties most commonly used are perennial grasses that not only thrive in hot weather, but also develop deep and extensive root systems. These properties can be exploited to reduce water consumption in normal years, and to minimize it during drought years. With the suitable variety and correct irrigation practice, the lawn may look poor under the minimalist regime, but its root system should remain intact, allowing the grass to appear as it should when more water is available in better years.
African Daisy ? Excellent Bedding Plants For An Arid Climate Garden
African daisy plants are not suitable for every location, and may not be to everyone’s taste. In the right place though, they are an important ingredient in dry and Mediterranean gardens.
African daisy is the name commonly used to describe a group of different bedding plants. All come from South Africa, sport a mass of daisy-like flowers (unsurprisingly!), and require similar conditions to grow successfully. Daisy flowers, typical of the Asteraceae botanical family, create a clear mood and design direction. They appear out of place in lush, tropical settings, typified by plants with massive leaves and large garish flowers. They are more suited in my view to the sparser, restrained style of a Mediterranean, dry climate garden.
Why Drip irrigation Is The Best Way Of Watering Your Garden Plants
There are some drawbacks with drip irrigation systems as opposed to sprinklers, but the advantages are so overwhelming that the gardener, especially in a dry climate, should consider installing one.
While automatic sprinkler systems are the most effective way of watering a lawn, drip irrigation, some drawbacks notwithstanding, is the preferred method for the rest of the garden plants. The essential difference between the two is that sprinklers throw water indiscriminately over the area they cover, as opposed to drippers that emit water in designated spots. Judging by the fact that sprinklers are still widely used for watering flowerbeds, trees and shrubs, it seems that the advantages of drip irrigation are not sufficiently clear to many gardeners. Before dealing with these, let’s outline first the disadvantages involved with drippers.