Designing Around the Plants
Plants have their own schedules, and understanding them can make all the difference in a planting! There's more to plant selection than bloom time alone. Learn why understanding a plant's life cycle matters when designing for the long haul in this week's blog!
Designing Around the Plant
A plant can look perfectly happy in May, disappear by August, and return the following spring as if nothing happened. Another might spend its first few years quietly establishing roots before finally making a noticeable appearance. If we're designing a landscape based only on what plants look like when they're flowering, we're missing quite a bit of the story.
The timing of a plant's growth, flowering, and dormancy is known as phenology. It's an important part of understanding how plants behave, and it can have a bigger impact on a planting than we might expect.
Different Schedules
Even in the same garden, plants can operate on very different timelines. Some emerge early, take advantage of available sunlight, and finish much of their growth before surrounding vegetation fills in. Others get going later, when temperatures rise or conditions become more favorable.
Woodland plants offer a good example. Spring ephemerals take advantage of the sunlight reaching the forest floor before deciduous trees leaf out. As the canopy closes, many complete their aboveground growth and retreat belowground. They're not necessarily struggling in the shade; they've adapted to a seasonal window that other plants might miss.
This is worth considering when selecting plants for a landscape. A space that looks crowded in June might have been nearly empty in March, while a planting that looks sparse in spring may fill out considerably later. Knowing the schedule can help you decide which plants work well together and whether an apparent gap is actually a problem.
Survival Strategies
Not all dormancy happens in winter. Some perennials go dormant during summer, particularly species adapted to regions with prolonged heat and seasonal drought. Rather than continuing to produce foliage under unfavorable conditions, they reduce or suspend aboveground growth until conditions improve.
For designers and growers, this matters. A plant that loses its foliage in midsummer might be behaving exactly as expected, not asking for more water or an emergency replacement. Of course, drought stress can also cause foliage loss, so understanding the species and its growing conditions is essential before deciding what's happening.
It also raises a useful design question: if a plant naturally disappears for part of the year, what occupies that space while it's dormant? Pairing species with complementary growth schedules can help maintain coverage without forcing every plant to perform year-round.
As It Matures
There's another timeline to consider: the years after installation.
Plants don't necessarily establish at the same rate, and their relationships can change as they grow. A species that initially occupies a small area may eventually spread, while another may decline as competition for light and space increases. Shade from surrounding trees can also change the conditions that originally made a planting successful.
A five-year-old planting may look quite different from the original design, even when the plants were well chosen. Research following perennial plantings over several years has documented changes in species composition and survival, reinforcing the importance of thinking beyond installation day.
That doesn't mean every change is a problem. Plant communities are dynamic. But understanding mature size, growth rate, and reproductive habits can help prevent a planting from becoming overcrowded or leaving unexpected gaps over time.
Between the Seasons
When choosing plants, bloom time is only one piece of useful information. Emergence, dormancy, growth rate, and the timing of leaf development can all influence how species work together.
For landscape professionals, these details can help guide plant combinations, spacing, and maintenance expectations. For growers, they provide useful context for understanding crop behavior and communicating what customers can expect after installation.
The next time a plant seems to vanish, take a moment before declaring it a lost cause. It might be struggling, or it might simply be following its own schedule. Plants have been managing their calendars long before we started putting bloom times on them.
