Planning your planting project

Why is design important?

The design of a planting project is important to achieving your original purpose. Specific purposes will call for specific design characteristics that can help accomplish your goals. For example:

• A planting intended to attract wildlife would be designed in an undulating or curved margin to improve the amount of edge. This refers to the area where two habitats, such as grassland and shrubs, meet. The more edge available, the more wildlife will use the habitat. Edge also provides a degree of protection to wildlife as they feed along these two merging habitats. A wildlife planting design should also include a greater variety of species and more fruit-bearing species than other purposes and designs would require, as you will want to provide food as well as shelter.
• A shelterbelt planting tends to be designed in longer, straighter lines, to enable fieldwork with large equipment. Acting as a windbreak, this type of planting can be designed with fewer species than the wildlife planting, and with longer continuous rows of single species, considering such characteristics as ability to trap snow, density, height and volume.