Winterizing your yard (the right way) actually is more about planning and planting the right way up front than it is about an endless checklist of October landscaping tasks.
A lot of people (me included) tend to believe that an amazing looking yard requires constant effort and care.
Amazing news: that’s just not true.
When you’ve designed your mid-century yard the right way … with a layout that complements the house and a collection of plants that look good in every season, there isn’t that much you must or SHOULD do to get the yard ready for winter!
Surprise, surprise, a little master plan thinking for your yard can keep it looking good and easy to care for all year round!
Let’s talk about how to plant a year round garden with great advice from Jim Drzewiecki (of Ginkgo Leaf Studio).
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Plan and plant for a year round garden
Planning RIGHT can save you literal days and years of yard work. When you have a mid-century landscape design full of plants that look good in all seasons, your yard will never have a down season.
AND when you choose plants well suited to your own climate, you won’t have to do a lot of swing season hustle to protect them from the elements!
Choose the right plants for winter (and the whole year)
Choosing plants that look good in all seasons means both having a succession of plants that will bloom and shine in each part of the year AND plants that have multiple seasons of interest.
Jim has warned in the past against just walking into a garden center and picking up what’s in bloom. Those plants will soon be done and then you’ve just got greenery (or something looking dead) alone in your yard. Instead group a series of spring, summer and fall featuring plants.
But also, you can pick plants that have multiple seasons of interest. Use evergreens for structure. Trees and shrubs that have interesting branching patterns look good even when their leaves fall. A serviceberry is one of Jim’s favorite plants to look lovely and support wildlife all year long.
For a yard that lasts into the winter, make sure to feature some late fall blooming plants that can stand through the winter.
Here in the midwest we can’t grow the Yuccas and Agaves that stand so dramatically in photos of mid-century yards in Palm Springs. That’s ok. We can use ornamental grasses in a similar way.
– both a variety of plants to have their moments to shine AND plants that have multiple seasons of interest (service berry)
Plan right for less yard work
Once you have the right plants (for your climate) in the yard you don’t need ot do much winterizing work. Cutting everything back to the ground, intensive mulching and wrapping plants in burlap are just not necessary.
Think about it this way. Any native plant to your region ought to be able to survive on it’s own under most conditions! One reason you’ll see avid gardeners constantly covering and pruning and watering and shading in their yards is that they are intentionally stretching their climate zone. (They find this fun.) So to feature plants that are from milder climates they are willing to put in a lot of labor.
If you don’t find yard work recreational … you don’t have to do the same!
Check out all the great advice from Jim
- A DIY Guide to Landscaping Your Mid-Century Yard with Ginkgo Leaf Designs
- Lighting up your MCM landscape with Ginkgo Leaf Design
- Mid-Century Hardscapes and Feature Elements with Ginkgo Leaf Studio
- Mid-century landscaping…is that a thing?
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- Why a critter friendly yard is also a winter friendly yard.
- How worried you should be about drunk robins.
- Where to invest in the spring for an interesting garden year round.
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And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
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- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann 00:00
Today, some more excellent advice on planning the landscape the yard of your mid-century home from Jim Drzewiecki of ginkgo leaf studios. Jim and I last spoke in September, and if you missed that episode, go check it out, because it’s full of excellent advice on how to get started on new projects or just your next project in a mid-century yard. So now you’re wondering why mid-October is a good time to talk more about landscaping.
Della Hansmann 00:23
Aren’t Jim and I in the Midwest? Isn’t this the time of year when there’s less to do and less beautiful growth happening outside? Well that’s exactly today’s subject. We are talking about how to winterize your mid-century yard, both what you can and should do outside in these weekends and late fall, and how to plan a yard that’s lovely in all seasons, including the winter.
Della Hansmann 00:43
Hey there. Welcome back to Mid Mod Midwest. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2213.
Della Hansmann 00:57
And this episode is it is about winterizing. It is about how to plant a year round garden. It is about Jim sharing the things he has learned in his own career, in his own yard and in working for clients. And it also kind of accidentally turned into me getting to ask Jim all the questions that I have about my yard and what I’ve been doing right and not so right in it over the last few years, if you are at all like me, a person who appreciates the beauty in a well curated yard around a mid-century house, but is not actually very good at your own yard, I think you’re gonna find this episode extremely helpful.
Della Hansmann 01:39
Yeah, let’s just, let’s just go out on a limb and assume that some of the questions I’m asking him are not just for myself, but are actually going to be quite applicable to people who are looking to make good, strong choices for their home, who are trying to make their life easier and their yard more charming and fun, and also who maybe are not experts in what, in how to take the best care of their mid-century yard.
Della Hansmann 02:08
So Jim’s going to give us advice on the importance of planting evergreens in a Midwest garden to provide structure and interest all year long. How you can leave your ornamental prairie plants standing through the winter, and not only will it be interesting and attractive, it’ll be beneficial for the local wildlife. He’s going to give us permission to not over tidy our yards in fall, in fact, to provide food for birds and insects and generally be good for our surrounding macro environment.
Della Hansmann 02:38
And we’re going to talk about plant choice and strategy to make your whole yard management easier, more pleasant, more fun, more successful. Jim actually said something toward the end of this episode that I want to highlight right up here at the top, and then I’ll let him make the point beautifully for himself later, which is that we are not necessarily trying to plan our yards like gardeners.
Della Hansmann 03:03
A gardener is someone who enjoys the work of being outside their home, of constantly preparing and changing and editing and tweaking their yard. A gardener may have a gorgeous yard, but it’s not an easy one. If you’re an average homeowner who just wants a beautiful landscape with minimal effect, you don’t want to take the advice of gardeners. And for gardeners, you want to take advice that you’re about to hear today.
Della Hansmann 03:27
And yet again, Jim and I really agree on the approach, just like you need a master plan for your house in order to have a stress free successful remodel, even if your home improvement projects are your hobby, having a plan in advance of taking much action at all on your yard is going to set you up for success and create something that is both more beautiful and also easier and more likely to succeed. All wins.
Della Hansmann 03:53
So let’s get right into winterizing and planning for winter as always, you’ll find the transcript of this episode, all the useful advice in one place, plus an easy way to find links to all the other episodes that we’ve had with Jim, all of his advice on mid-century landscaping and mid-century yards over the last several years on my website, go to the show notes page. midmod-midwest.com/ 2213. Here we go.
Della Hansmann 04:20
It’s so good to have you back again. Jim Drzewiecki, landscape designer and owner of ginkgo leaf studio, is one of my favorite people to ask for advice about what to do outside of the mid-century house, the yard, the hardscaping, the plantings, and as we’re coming towards the end of the season, I wanted to have him back on and talk about mid-century yards in winter. Hi, how are you doing?
Jim Drzewiecki 04:43
I’m doing great. How are you good?
Della Hansmann 04:45
Good. So last time, we were talking about how important it is to think about not just the season you are currently gardening in, but to think beyond Memorial Day weekend energy, beyond what’s pretty in the fall, and think all. The way through the year. What do you think about winter as a midwestern experience and maybe, maybe as a universal experience of planning for a garden?
Jim Drzewiecki 05:11
I would argue winter is just as important as the other three seasons. If you’ve lived in the Midwest your entire life like I have same, yeah, people have seasonal, you know, disorder with the lack of sun and vitamin D and everything that goes with that. And so the last thing you want is, is a bleak landscape that’s, that’s a word I’ve been using a lot lately. We want to avoid that feeling in your yard. That can mean as simple a thing as making sure you have a good ratio of evergreen plants to deciduous plants. I was once criticized by a fellow designer for not putting enough evergreens in some of my designs, and I haven’t forgotten that, but also there’s so many other things, and I’m going to maybe pull fall into this discussion too.
Jim Drzewiecki 06:13
Sure, there’s so many things available to us with the seasonal change from fall into winter that we in a Midwest design get to take advantage of as a designer, the landscape doesn’t have to end at the end of summer, when everything stops blooming. There are fall blooming plants that you can throw into the mix. The whole reason, one of the main reasons ornamental grasses became such a thing in the 90s and have carried forward to today, is that they remain standing in the fall and through the winter and give structure to a garden. I always say the ornamental grasses are the yuccas and the agaves of Palm Springs for the Midwest.
Jim Drzewiecki 07:06
So if you’ve seen a design you like where you say, Oh, I really like how they did that row of agaves. Well, you’re in Minnesota. That’s not going to work, but you could pick an ornamental grass that maybe has the same height and shape to it and do the very same thing. Then you go on to even looking at, well, what do the flowers look like on the given plant when they dry up and turn brown in the fall? The structure of some trees can be really beautiful to look at in the winter that you might not notice that structure when they’re fully leafed out.
Jim Drzewiecki 07:46
Yeah, the bark, does a plant have peeling bark or colored bark? Are there berries on a given plant that will stay on the plant through the fall and winter? So there’s, there’s all these tricks that if you know your plants, you can make sure that the landscape doesn’t just look like everything died, and now it’s going to be a depressing three or four months until spring comes.
Della Hansmann 08:16
Yeah, yeah. And it’s interesting to think about plants as structure, which, of course, they are. But if you are purely planning your garden based on annuals you pick up at the garden center, those are largely going to vanish right back down to the ground when they’re done with their bloom.
Della Hansmann 08:32
So that doesn’t leave you with anything. That leaves you with a purely flat bed. So thinking about things that have structure, that will last, that will stand through the winter, even if it’s going to come down. Even if it’s going to come down again, like a grass. When? So, if you’ve got ornamental grasses as part of your winter Structure Plan, when do you do you go in and cut them back? Do you give them a chance to start over? Or are there some plants that, some grasses that grow up through themselves? How does that work best?
Jim Drzewiecki 09:01
That is a great question. It’s one of the things I wanted to talk about today. Oh, perfect, because you meant off camera. We were talking about winterizing a
Della Hansmann 09:12
garden. Yeah, exactly what to do to get it ready for the snow times, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 09:16
And honestly, I was thinking about that, and I don’t winterize my garden, I guess in the true definition of the word, and I think that’s because of that right plant, right place idea. I’m not a big fan of doing a garden where I have to put I remember the Styrofoam cones that people would put over their roses. Yes,
Della Hansmann 09:43
I’ve got a couple of neighbors who do that, and their roses are beautiful in season, but it is a bit of an odd clearly, it’s their preference, and that’s great for them, but it does there is a Styrofoam container or a weird sort of netting object, right for. Months there quite a while.
Jim Drzewiecki 10:02
I understand when it needs to be done, but wrapping evergreens with burlap to make them get through the winter? Well, one of the reasons to have evergreens is so that you see something green in the winter, and if you mummify it with burlap, you’re not seeing the green plant in the winter. So it’s, it’s kind of counterintuitive in a way. What’s
Della Hansmann 10:25
it for that one specifically? What’s the logic is that having chosen a species that just isn’t up for the hardiness necessary for the Midwestern winter, or is that sort of like an old wives tale of people are doing it because they feel like they should?
Jim Drzewiecki 10:38
Yeah, it’s a little of both. Wind burn in the winter is a real thing, and evergreens can lose moisture through their leaves and their needles, so that’s something that the burlap helps protect them from. Evergreens that are planted out near a street or a road are going to get exposed to road salt spray, burlap can help protect them from that.
Jim Drzewiecki 11:08
But I also think sometimes the wrapping of evergreens or covering ground cover areas with pine boughs or spruce clippings, I think is maybe a little old wives tale maintenance company is getting a chance to charge for a little bit of extra work. Got it now that segues to the point I wanted to make where you asked about cutting grasses back we Hannah and I are big believers in a spring cleanup of our perennials, not a fall cleanup.
Jim Drzewiecki 11:48
Okay? I think lots of landscapers sell fall cleanups. I truly think it’s a way to extend their billable season, more than anything, because you do want these plants to be standing all fall and winter, that first frost we get, if you have cone flowers standing and dried hydrangea flowers and ornamental grasses, it’s like Jack Frost came in and individually painted everything. They are so pretty.
Della Hansmann 12:21
Yeah,
Jim Drzewiecki 12:22
If those plants were cut down in the fall, you talk about bleak you have nothing to look at. So grasses should remain standing until the spring. You have to know your varieties of grasses, because one of the most popular grasses out there, Carl Forrester, it’s a very narrow, upright grass. It is not native, so it’s considered what we call a cool season grass, which means it starts growing while we’re still in a cool season.
Jim Drzewiecki 12:55
Because of that, it’s great for screening things like air conditioners, because the daffodils may still be blooming and Carl forester grass could already be 12 inches tall. Oh, nice. So a cool season grass, you want to actually cut back before the new growth starts. Okay? Our native grass is like switch grass. You have time, because they really don’t get going till June, and then you can cut that brown old growth back. But you are helping the plant also, because now it has room to send up its new growth.
Della Hansmann 13:34
But in both cases, you’re waiting till spring. It’s just you’ve got to be Johnny on the spot with the Carl Forster or, yes,
Jim Drzewiecki 13:41
yeah. And alliums. You mentioned alliums in our previous talk I did. I’m not talking about the big globe alliums that are the true spring bulb alliums, but the perennial Allium. One of the nice things about it being in the allium family is it does send up its leaves very early again, when the tulips and daffodils are blooming. Allium is starting to grow. I think it’s nice because you get to see something green, yeah, that time of year
Della Hansmann 14:12
And it’s structure already early in that, not through the winter in the spring, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 14:18
But you don’t want all those dried flower stems from the previous year to get in the way of that new foliage growth.
Della Hansmann 14:25
Okay, interesting. So you kind of have to know how early your garden is starting to time that get out there and clean it up.
Jim Drzewiecki 14:32
You have to understand that there are certain plants that are going to grow or start growing earlier than others.
Della Hansmann 14:39
I’ve gone both ways, and I will admit it’s largely a combination of happenstance and laziness. When I take down the prairie plants in front of my house, whether I do it in the fall or the spring, when I leave them through the winter, I do notice they tend to kind of get crushed by one or the other of the big snowy dumps. Is there anything you can do to help them? Should I put in some like row? Open guide wire or something like that, or is it hopeless? They’re just going to eventually fall
Jim Drzewiecki 15:06
that is a tough one. It’s funny that you brought that up, because I almost was going to say something about it.
Della Hansmann 15:13
This is me purely just picking your brain for my own asset at this point.
Jim Drzewiecki 15:17
Well, one of my favorite clients, I won’t say his name, because I’d be name dropping, but he’s very persnickety about how his landscape looks. And we put in these beautiful switch grasses behind an undulating fieldstone wall in his front yard, and they looked amazing in the fall, because they turn bright gold. Oh, gorgeous, and then they turn tan. But we got a heavy wet snow, and it flattened them, and he has had his grasses cut back ever since. Oh no, so now he doesn’t, he just does not want to see that happen again.
Della Hansmann 16:02
Well, I suppose, is it possible? I don’t know. This might be a little bit unhinged behavior once they’ve been flattened. Can you go out and do anything about it between one snow and another? Or
Jim Drzewiecki 16:12
it’s not a crazy question. I guess. I’ve never tried it in my own garden. I suspect probably most of the stems are probably breaking. They’re not going to be able to be
Della Hansmann 16:24
that’s what I mean, I find that there’s, well, there’s not really much to prop but I don’t even, I mean, I don’t really cut them. I just go back and pick up all the broken pieces or maybe jiggle them back and forth to get the last actions gone. Once they’ve broken. Yeah, they don’t stand back up again.
Jim Drzewiecki 16:39
But I think it’s this sounds more dramatic than it needs to be, but it’s the risk you take
Della Hansmann 16:48
that does sound dramatic, but I hear you on that
Jim Drzewiecki 16:50
by leaving these plants standing so that in the fall and winter, you have something to look at. And yeah, if we get 12 inches of wet snow one night, because it happens, it’s going to impact how things look. Yeah, I should have taken this photo. It was two falls ago. I’m backing out of my driveway, and I look at my house, and I’m telling you, if I could pat myself on the back. As a designer, I had all these different grasses still standing. I had this, the structural evergreens and boxwoods there, the Korean maple still showing fall color, the dried heads on my hydrangeas, and every different shade of brown you can think of. And it looked, I mean, it looked like a painting. It was this snapshot of what a fall garden can really look like. And I love driving past my house in the winter after there’s been a snow because it looks way better than everyone else’s in my neighborhood.
Della Hansmann 18:08
I think you’re right. I think, I think the first decision I made, because I’d had a couple of wet snow crushes of the prairie bed, I decided last year I would be tidy and clean it all up, and then it felt very bleak until this is why I was out running around, thinking there’s nothing my yard has been flattened, and it’s not growing in until July, and so I’m looking at other people’s spring plantings, and like looking for the allium structure, because it’s up already. But I could also solve this problem. Maybe it’s a twofer, but I could solve this problem by not cutting it back to zero. I think you’re
Jim Drzewiecki 18:41
also helping the wildlife, the birds that are hanging around are going, there are seeds in the spent flowers of various perennials, liatris, South goldfinches love the spent flowers on salvias, yeah. So if you want to see goldfinches in your yard, plant some salvia. The cone flowers. The cone becomes a little pot of seeds that the birds are going to eat. You know, until they’ve depleted them, you’re not even supposed to cut your perennials down too early in the spring because certain bee species and other insects live in the stems.
Della Hansmann 19:29
Oh, really,
Jim Drzewiecki 19:30
You’re not supposed to pull your leaf litter away too early because there are some insects that are living in that leaf litter that haven’t erupted yet to be alive again. So if you bag all your leaf litter too early, you might be bagging some, you know, butterfly cocoons or whatever. So there, there really is this, you know, getting into. With nature, kind of idea to understand the right time of year to do very certain things, because if you do them at the wrong time, there can be some slightly detrimental effects from that.
Della Hansmann 20:16
That’s so interesting, too. And I think a lot of the people who listen to this podcast are interested in making sustainability minded choices for their house, and so probably would be swayed by an argument to keep up perennials through the winter as bird life. I certainly see the little birds landing on the stems and stalks of my front yard prairie grasses.
Della Hansmann 20:36
I noticed they also my next door neighbors have a very old fashioned yard with very carefully curated trimmed that are out there with the box trimmed. I don’t know what type of leafy and evergreen shrubs they’ve got, but it’s it was an 80 year old’s house, or maybe more like a 90 year old’s house, until a few years ago, and the new young family that’s moved in haven’t made any changes.
Della Hansmann 21:02
They also have grapes in their front yard that really grape in the fall, and I have consistently forgotten to tell the new owners that that’s happening, and I’m not sure that they know anyway, that’s beside the point. But the there is like a flock of little birds that I can’t identify, sometimes, little sparrow something that live in their evergreen and then fly over all at once and land on the plants in my prairie bed and then fly all the way again and hide in the Evergreen. And it’s they’re really cute.
Jim Drzewiecki 21:28
Yeah. Berries on certain trees and shrubs are huge. Cedar waxwings love the berries on spring blooming service Berry. So if you put that native tree in your landscape, you’re almost always going to have cedar waxwings in your yard, and they travel in these chattering little flocks, robins love service berries too, but, but that takes me to the crab apples, and they’ve actually bred some crab apples now, because some people hear crab apple and they immediately think, I don’t want crab apples all over my patio, where they’re going to attract Hornets in my grass.
Jim Drzewiecki 22:10
Well, they’ve bred some crab apples now to have what’s called persistent fruit, because it persists on the tree. It doesn’t fall to the ground. The fun, added bonus of that, beyond seeing berries on the tree all winter, is that in the spring, when the Robins migrate back, that’s one of the first trees they go looking for to replenish their energy. And fruit that sat on a crab apple over the winter is now fermented. Ah, and you will get to watch drunk Robin staggering around under your crab apple.
Della Hansmann 22:52
Oh, it’s fabulous. Yeah, you know, I knew it ferment. There’s the this is such a digression, but the park where I walk my dog every morning. Is an 80 acre former county property just outside of Madison, and it was once an orchard. And so it’s come it’s there’s apple trees all over it, and the trees, nobody harvests them. They’re all chaotically high. And so they drop a lot of apples on the ground, and they do ferment, and all the dogs eat the fermented apples. I’ve not noticed them getting drunk, but they create a smell. You smell them in the spring when the snow goes away, but that’s hilarious to think of the intoxicated Robins joyous.
Jim Drzewiecki 23:32
It doesn’t take much to make a Robin drunk.
Della Hansmann 23:36
No, they are the definition of lightweights. Yes, well, this isn’t probably we can’t. Well, we could do a whole episode on it, I’m sure, but maybe we should just touch on it. Now, if you wanted to plant and we were going to talk about winterizing, but if you want to plant a yard that’s going to attract birds, do you have go to do you have people that ask you for this just point of interest, and then what do you advise them if they want a bird friendly landscape?
Jim Drzewiecki 24:00
People don’t ask me as much about a bird friendly landscape as they might say butterflies, okay, but that being said, kind of not necessarily as a focus, but if you just plant a good looking garden with seasonality, sort of the byproduct is that you’re going to have a bird friendly garden. Number one, you’re attracting a lot of insects, and that means the birds are going to be eating the insects.
Jim Drzewiecki 24:33
When a client says, I want a butterfly garden for my daughters to look at somewhere in the landscape, my answer always is, your whole yard is going to be a butterfly garden and I could argue, really a pollinator garden. And certainly that’s become a more important topic lately with the issues with honeybees and beak. Colonies collapsing. I have neighbors, three or four little kids. They live on a property that had horses, so it’s a decent sized lot, and they make honey. They have they have apiary. They have beehives and one summer, they brought us a little jar of honey with a tag on it that said, thank you for feeding our bees.
Della Hansmann 25:28
That’s so dear. Oh, right,
Jim Drzewiecki 25:31
so my flowers were helping their bees and that’s kind of what we strive for in any landscape you have your prairie perennials, I would say 50% of the perennials, if not more, that we put in a typical landscape, are either true native prairie plants or a cultivar of a native that’s what we want. We want to be feeding the bees. The alliums that I mentioned are bee magnets. Oh, I shot video where the allium flowers are practically moving because there’s so many bees in the plant. Monarda attracts hummingbirds.
Jim Drzewiecki 26:14
So if you, if you really love hummingbirds, put a bee balm monarda plant in your garden, hyssop that I’ve mentioned before, bumblebees love that plant, and the bumblebees and the honeybees are the nice pollinators, right? They’re not the jerks of the insect world like the wasps and Hornets, who do pollinate. But anytime someone is worried about, you know, attracting too many stinging insects. I always remind them that really, probably 95% of the insects that will be visiting your flowers are going to be the honeybees and bumblebees, and those are not the aggressive ones.
Della Hansmann 26:55
And we like, Yeah, we like supporting those. Is there anything else, actually? Now I’m just taking us right away from winter. Although we’ve, we’ve touched on planting for seasons. What do you think about we’ve talked about not cutting down your official plantings. What do you think about like a no mow may approach or trying to leave lawn areas alone up to a certain point for pollinator friendliness?
Jim Drzewiecki 27:18
Yeah. Um, I’ve, heard both camps on the whole no more may thing. I think, of course, the less pesticides, the better. I’ve heard horror stories about a certain type of tree being sprayed at the wrong time of year, and the next day, they found dead bumblebees all over the ground, so the less pesticides, the better.
Jim Drzewiecki 27:49
And if that means living with a few dandelions in your yard, I am all for that, because I am so cognizant of making sure the landscape is healthy for the pollinators. So I think anything you can do that takes us back to not removing leaf litter too early and not cutting stems down too early, because the early season bees are the ones that you’re going to be impacting, right? It’s the queens, right? That are out there, Queens and carpenter bees, I think are early season B, so they may be in those stems, overwintering, those are all things that should be thought about in terms of the landscape and the seasonality of it. I forgot to just touch on the winterizing thing. If you are picking the right plants, I don’t really have to winterize my landscape.
Jim Drzewiecki 28:50
I let nature be the winterizing I’m not. I’m not wrapping in burlap. I’m not covering plants to protect them in the winter; I’m leaving them be. The one caution I might make, and I think I experienced this this past winter, is you can maybe put the leaf litter too thick, and then you might be creating a haven for the moles and the voles and the mice to hang out in your plant beds over the winter, got it so there, I think there’s a limit to just how much leaf litter you should have. Of course, it helps the plants, but I think if you have too much, you might be encouraging the rodents to be hanging around more.
Della Hansmann 29:36
Ultimately, I think your advice tends towards we’re planting things that are suited to this climate zone, and so they shouldn’t need too much of a boost to make it through the winter, part of the season, correct?
Jim Drzewiecki 29:48
And in the summer, I don’t put sprinklers out. I don’t irrigate my plants, because once they’re established, the varieties I’ve chosen should. Not need supplemental watering
Della Hansmann 30:03
well, and that should speak to efficiency as well as energy efficiency that it’s that’s one more garden task. You don’t have to
Jim Drzewiecki 30:11
do one less task using less water and ecologically sound.
Della Hansmann 30:18
Yeah, that’s great. All right. Well, anything else you would think about, I probably will point to this episode with a note about winter. Anything else you think about setting up for an esthetically pleasing winter oriented garden that you do, either to winterize or just any time of the year, the choices you make overall,
Jim Drzewiecki 30:40
I think if you can pick plants in general that have more than one season of interest, it’s so easy to just pick that certain plant because you like how it looks when it’s flowering. A colleague of mine once pointed out that you might want to think about what that plant looks like when it’s not flowering, because maybe it even becomes an ugly plant. Those fall blooming perennials I mentioned before, and I’ll name a couple right here, legularia, broadleaf legularia. There’s a legularia variety that blooms in June, July, that has spiky leaves but broad leafed.
Jim Drzewiecki 31:24
Legularia blooms in September and October. There are fall anemones. One is called September charm. It starts blooming in September, sometimes earlier. So thinking about plants that have more than one season, ideally two or three. It’s rare to find the true four season plant, the service berry tree I mentioned earlier, is actually a plant I would call a four season plant, because besides its spring bloom, it’s summer berries, it’s fall color. It has multiple branches, so it has great winter structure, yeah, so it’s kind of crazy how many factors go into us choosing a plant palette for a project, because we’re thinking about height with foliage, texture, foliage color.
Jim Drzewiecki 32:24
You can have too much green. We’ve even been talking just recently how we need to maybe mix in more plants that have burgundy foliage or chartreuse foliage. The form of the plant? Is it wide and squat? Is it tall and skinny, the Evergreen issue that I’ve talked about before that if you don’t have evergreens, even if you have all this cool texture and fall color, it’s going to be missing that key ingredient that really is sort of the bones of a fall and winter landscape is helping some evergreen plants,
Della Hansmann 33:05
I think that’s I think that’s great. And at the risk of overwhelming people, I think the answer is detailed planning, planning ahead, starting small, as we talked about last time, and then building in the layers that you’re looking for, but also just trying to pre imagine the situations as much as you can, and do your research, choosing things that are the right for the climate zone, and then as many of those other checklist items as you can, as you sort of build out what you’re putting into your yard, there are wins to be had. And as you say, when you do it right, you don’t have to winter, winterize, you don’t have to water. You can be living sort of your garden. Can be living in the season just like you are,
Jim Drzewiecki 33:43
I think if most of your followers saw my front yard in the summer, they’d say you’re lying if you’re telling me that you don’t do anything to this garden. But I really don’t, and part of it is because I’m lazy. Part of it is because I don’t have time in the summer because of what my own job is, right?
Della Hansmann 34:07
Oh, man, yeah, if you haven’t planned a low maintenance garden for yourself, it won’t get the care it needs when you’re busy for other people, right?
Jim Drzewiecki 34:14
It’s that, you know, saying that the mechanic drives the car that’s all beat up and not running well, yeah, it should be the opposite, but I just want a landscape that’s going to look amazing and doesn’t require a lot of effort on my part, and if you have the expertise to do that, I mean, that’s why we exist, And that’s why people hire us to do their landscapes, because they maybe just don’t really want to dive into Google and plant books and all those things to make sure that they are doing it right.
Della Hansmann 34:53
Yeah, no, I think that’s a really good point that people, I think a lot, because. Sometimes people who love to garden love to putter. They it can be seem like, when you’re not a person who’s done a lot of gardening, that the only way to have a beautiful garden is to constantly work in it. But it’s also, to me, it sounds wonderful to hear that it’s possible to plan for a garden that will look good and kind of take care of itself and need a few annual cycle things, but doesn’t need constant, meticulous manipulation, because it’s been planned to do well where it is.
Jim Drzewiecki 35:27
There’s definitely a difference between the classic gardener that that likes to putter, that will put plants in, that need to be protected in the winter, that will try to stretch the garden zones and put in plants that probably won’t live, but they’re going to give it a shot. And the average homeowner, I’m telling you, I could give an average homeowner a landscape that might actually look better than the gardener’s landscape solely based on putting in the right plants.
Della Hansmann 36:08
That also, I mean, I think there’s a certain element to if you love a craft or a specific sort of hobby, you can sometimes take yourself into overly elaborate versions of it just because you’ve done it for a long time, and you like to make things complicated, but sometimes the most beautiful answer isn’t the most over complicated. So that’s, yeah, I think that’s a really good maybe that is a punchline for this episode, is that it doesn’t actually have to require a whole lot of work to be beautiful, thoughtful, environmentally friendly, pollinator friendly and require not so much water in the summer too
Jim Drzewiecki 36:45
well. And you just used a great word. It’s, it’s one of my favorite words lately, and that’s thoughtful. And my other favorite word is intentional. And those are, I think, the basis of what we do as Ginko leaf studio, those, those are our buzzwords when we’re doing a design, because we’re not just whipping up a quick plant list of things we like that. You know, let’s just and we’re not doing that over and over again on every project we do, every yard is unique.
Jim Drzewiecki 37:21
Every client is unique. Every house is unique. And if we are still trying to play off the house, well then, every one of your followers yards should look different. Yeah, they shouldn’t look like the same thing over and over again. And we’ve talked about this even last year; I think a Midwest landscape should look like it belongs in the Midwest. I agree. That means some prairie plants. That means some grasses don’t try to recreate Palm Springs in front of your Minnesota house or your Ohio House. Say no to white marble chip. Yeah.
Della Hansmann 38:06
And speaking of high maintenance hassles, absolutely, that’s, that’s
Jim Drzewiecki 38:12
you are creating more maintenance and effort for yourself if you try to make your landscape not be what it should be.
Della Hansmann 38:24
Yeah, I think there’s a difference between curating something that’s really appropriate and tailored for the people, the House and the micro environment, as opposed to just sort of choosing something willfully that doesn’t fit the landscape, the seasons, the place where we are putting it so well I have I feel like I got to be very selfish in this episode and ask a bunch of questions of you that have been on my mind for a while, but hopefully there’ll be other ambitious, but less outside, energetic fellow homeowners that are getting some good advice. And I really feel like now I’ve been authorized to leave my prairie plants up this winter and let the chips fall, if they may. They may crush before it’s over, but I’ll get much longer to enjoy them, certainly than I would if I went out and chopped them down before the first snow.
Jim Drzewiecki 39:14
So well, and we’ve had winters that don’t have a lot of snow, it’s
Della Hansmann 39:20
true, or it doesn’t fall till February, so right, and it may be
Jim Drzewiecki 39:23
happening more. So imagine cutting down all your perennials and grasses only to have a winter with no snow. That would that would really be bleak. So I think that alone is the reason to consider, you know, keeping everything standing.
Della Hansmann 39:43
Yeah, I think that’s, that’s a really good point. And to tie this back right at the end to an episode we’ve done in the past where we talked about lighting a mid-century landscape and getting Christmas lights planned into that one reason, I’ll be able to leave it standing this year that it wasn’t last year is that I’ve done some more. Landing, and I’ve got permanent hooks in for my under the Eve Christmas light string.
Della Hansmann 40:06
It’s not up all year, but it’s going to take less work to put it up now, so I won’t have to get in there with a ladder and do some pre crushing of the prairie plantings that are right underneath. That’s a good thing. So I will link, by the way, if I You’re if that piqued your interest, good lighting for mid-century landscapes. I’ll link to that episode in the show notes. So that’s a really good one to go check out.
Della Hansmann 40:27
Actually, I will listen. I will link to all of the past gym episodes because they are basically all absolutely chock full of excellent advice, and we will have to have you back again to get more. I don’t know exactly when that lead, but in the meantime, write us an email, comment on Instagram, comment on YouTube. Let us know what your questions are about landscaping around mid-century houses, because I think you’ve got more to tell us.
Jim Drzewiecki 40:54
And I’ll second that if any of your listeners and viewers do come up with questions that they want to funnel to me through you. They’re just giving us new subjects to talk about in the future.
Della Hansmann 41:10
Absolutely. Well, I’ve gotten, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback over the years about the things you’ve had to say in the past and how helpful people have found that. So thank you for coming again and sharing your wisdom with everyone, and also specifically answering some of my questions about my yard this time, of course, great to chat with you, and we will do it again soon.
Jim Drzewiecki 41:29
Okay, thank you.
Della Hansmann 41:34
So grab that episode highlighting mid-century yard lighting, and particularly Christmas lighting planned in your whole in your yard master plan, if you will. Plus the transcript for this episode and all the other great advice that Jim has shared with mid mod remodel podcast over the years at midmod-midwest.com/2213.
Della Hansmann 41:55
And thanks again to Jim for all of this excellent advice, reassurance and really the permission structure to plan our yards like homeowners and not necessarily like gardeners. And for all the gardeners out there, if you are a gardener listening absolutely Knock yourself out planning the most elaborate, high maintenance, detail oriented garden you want, that’s kind of the way I like to knit, but that’s not the way I like to do my yard.
Della Hansmann 42:22
So for everyone that loves to work in their yard, go crazy, but for everyone who just wants a beautiful yard that flatters their mid-century house and is relatively appropriate for their microclimate, go give the transcript a scroll and see if there is anything you need to actually jot down for your future reference. That’s all for this week.
Della Hansmann 42:41
Next week, I’m going to be back with mid-century remodel nightmares for, you know, Halloween spooky season. We’re going to talk about some of the nightmare scenarios for mid-century houses that we see too many places. Maybe with some how you can avoid them, certainly with reflecting back on a couple of episodes go when we had unflipping on there are things you can do about them, but we’re just going to cathartically get some of it out of our system.
Della Hansmann 43:06
So if you’ve got something you want to share with me, make sure you drop it into my Instagram DMS before next week, and I may include it in the podcast. Thanks so much. See you then.