Dying to Delightful - Driveway Garden Transformation

For this project, we travelled out to the bustling city of Markham where we were tasked with creating a centralized garden surrounded by a driveway.

Being on a busy road the customer wanted to create a garden with 360-degree views that showcased multiple layers of colour. With this in mind, we started by picking our focal point that would be centralized in the garden and represent the top of the pyramid. For this, we selected an 8ft specimen Japanese Maple that was grown locally to ensure a successful transplant, as larger specimen are more susceptible to shock. The next layer in our design consisted of Wine & Rose Weigela, Goldmound Spirea, and Endless Summer Hydrangeas that would provide contrasting colours to the Japanese Maple with ranging bloom times and durations to provide year-round flowering. For the outer layer, we elected to go with green Velvet Boxwoods. This variety is a shorter growing boxwood that can be hedged to set a border and at the same time not hide the other layers. In the northern hemisphere, an important consideration when using boxwoods is how snow will be plowed during the winter months. Depending on if your driveway is plowed with a truck or by hand the snow can be pushed onto the boxwoods and damage the foliage. Typically, we would never recommend edging an entire driveway in boxwoods but for this project, there was plenty of space to push snow elsewhere. To finalize the design, we used large river rocks, due to the size of the plants and garden bed. A best practice for spreading aggregates within a garden is to layout the garden and pre-dig the holes for your design then cover the holes with empty pots upside down.

Then with the holes properly covered install the river rock either by hand or by machine. This cuts labour for spreading aggregates in half and provides a buffer area for the plants once installed. This method prevents the damage to plants that is typically caused when installing aggregates after installation. Overall, this garden provides a lot of flexibility on how it will mature and be maintained as the plants selected can be hedged or shaped to the customer's liking.