Get to the point with your garden design

Focal points are a garden’s visual resting spots. In the flashy riot and exuberance of a summer garden, they lead the eye through it all, gently imposing order on a view. At every season, a tall, carefully placed urn, a sparkling birdbath or a handsome specimen shrub doesn’t steal the glory from the rest of the garden — it enhances the scene by giving it direction.

“The most common mistake people make is, they try all these different varieties of plants, and their backyard ends up looking like a tossed salad,” says Mike Miller, a landscape architect at Ewseychik, Rice Miller in Longwood, Fla. “We use a broad, simple palette,” he says, “and create focal points.”

Finding a focal point and settling on an appropriate plant or architectural element to achieve the desired effect may take some thought and effort. Some designers actually give their clients a large, empty picture frame and ask them to walk around with it, defining the important views.

Taking pictures of your garden will also reveal the places that naturally attract your eye as well as spots that need to be screened from view. You’ll be able to forget about an annoying utility pole if you plant a screen of evergreens and place an arbor strategically in your line of sight.

Peggy Krapf, a garden designer in Toano, Va., near Williamsburg, works hard on the details in her client’s gardens. One suburban garden seemed to have all the right elements but simply did not feel welcoming.

“There were all these little bits,” she says. “They had nice plants and paths and a fountain, but they were like separate thoughts.” Visitors were not sure where the garden began or how to approach it, and the existing paths hurried them along without encouraging them to enjoy the experience along the way.

Krapf needed to unify the garden. She first suggested a proper garden gate. The 4-foot-high gate, flanked by evergreen shrubs, makes visitors pause a little before entering the garden, allowing them to take in the scene.

Krapf then placed a bench at the end of the path, creating a destination, and moved a few shrubs to make the fountain the focus of the view from the porch. In another client’s garden, she designed a curving stone bench to put in one corner. The bench draws visitors out to enjoy the flower beds up close and takes the sharp edge off the corner of the property.

In her own large country garden, Krapf put a garden bench at the end of an axis, about 50 feet from her front door. The bench occupies a space with raised flower beds on either side and invites her to sit there and admire her blooms.

From the bench, looking back toward the house, she created a sort of focal point in reverse, framing the view of her own front porch between an oversized urn and a columnar boxwood.

“We often use containers as focal points around a door or on a patio,” says Molly Moriarty, a garden designer and owner of Heart and Soil Design in Minneapolis. “We’re shooting color where we need it.” Pots full of flowers also lend structure to the whole setting.

Containers can be a challenge through the winter in cold climates, but Moriarty fills them with twigs, evergreen branches, dried vines and seed heads. They bristle with texture and look especially pretty in the snow. When spring comes, she replants with cold-tolerant flowers such as pansies and with ornamental kale and cabbages.

Shifting light and shadows will affect the way you experience an arbor. You can enjoy the blooms and perfume of roses or other climbing plants in summer and the tracery of vines in the winter.

A birdbath will attract different complements of visitors at various times of year. A specimen tree planted as a focal point will change through the seasons, too: A crabapple, redbud or another hardy flowering tree might be covered with blooms in spring and with berries or decorative seedpods in the fall and winter.

Even small gardens have room for more than one focal point, but it is best not to let them compete with one another. If you can see three focal points at once, the garden is already out of focus.

And make sure the focal points you choose are in scale and in character with your garden. In general, sculpture, flowerpots or plants used as focal points should be large enough to command attention. Bold strokes are more effective than subtle touches.

An armillary sphere or sundial on a plinth should sit well above the flowers around it or stand all by itself. When your focal point stands out proudly, the rest of the garden seems to come to attention, too.

Trees to consider

Just follow the lines in your garden and you’ll discover where the focal points should be, says Robert Whitman, landscape architect at Gould Evans, a planning and design firm with offices in Kansas City.

“There are always places where your eye is drawn, and it’s good to try to take advantage of that with something special that makes it worth the view,” Whitman says.

Whitman, who worked with local arborists and nursery experts to compile a “Great Trees” list for Kansas City, says trees can be an excellent choice for a focal point.

Trees such as a weeping Norway spruce or a Japanese umbrella pine — not often seen in local gardens — are worthy of a place where they can be appreciated, Whitman says. A weeping redbud, a tricolor beech or a variegated Kousa dogwood would also be a good candidate. Your choice will depend on your tastes and the scale of the garden. The soil, the exposure and the tree’s mature size and habit should all be taken into consideration.

Whitman’s list of evergreen trees for our area, available online, includes more than two dozen choices for specimen evergreens, all of which would make excellent focal points, he says.

Whatever you choose, don’t clutter up your views of it, Whitman says. Keeping the foreground simple increases the impact.

Lists of “Great Trees for the Kansas City Region” and “Evergreen Trees for the Kansas City Region” are both available on Gould Evans’ website.