ColorBlock Garden Design Cards
As a landscape architect in New England, I have developed an original and effective design method for gardeners new and experienced alike. With a shuffling of these easy-to-grasp plant cards, you can deal yourself a dream garden! Using artist’s skill in assembling colors that work well together in the garden (Pastels for spring or jewel tones for fall, for example), each card is “color boxed” with squares of color companions for plant ideas that would be a perfect match. But the final choices are up to you as this garden is custom tailored by you!
Colorblock Garden Design Cards (Native Perennials and Native Shrubs: Zones 2-9) includes 165 Native Plant cards inside. 55 hardy plants for Sun, Shade and Part Shade. 25 Deciduous and Evergreen Shrubs and 30 Perennials. 3 cards of each plant with easy-to-follow instructions so you can plan complete gardens!
Colorblock Garden Design Cards (New England Perennials: Zones 3-8) includes one box of 150 business card-size plant cards featuring 50 field tested perennials. Three copies of each plant are offered to facilitate complete garden planning.
How To Use the Cards
Step 1. What are your garden's light conditions -- sun, part-shade, shade? Or perhaps your selected spot extends to include all three exposures? No matter -- you can place adjacent plant cards to reflect the changing conditions. how do you design by sequential or concurrent blooms?
Step 2. How big is your garden? Get an approximate space measurement in terms of width and length of your proposed garden. All of the information you need to fit your garden space is on your cards along with more details such as soil preferences.
Step 3. Find some plants that appeal to you and meet your sunlight requirements. Check the Colorboxes on the cards to find companion plant colors that make the collection sing!
Step 4. Arrange the plants by height into front-to-back rows following the details provided on the cards. Choose the number of plants you will need to fill your allotted space. Each card has generalized size labels to help you place the plants in the front, middle or back of your borders, in addition to width and height in feet and inches. Place the wider plants further apart to reflect accurate spacing.
Step 5. Take a snapshot to record your plan and go find your plants!
Here you find an explanation of all of the information included on each card. And, you are given a model of how to layout the cards using the Colorblock design method.
A few of the 50 featured plants in the New England Perennials deck
A few of the 50 featured plants in the Natives Perennials and shrubs deck
“I love the spirit and enthusiasm Elizabeth brings to her workshops. She does a wonderful job of instructing her students on how to use the ColorBlock Garden Design Cards. I would definitely recommend purchasing these cards as an aid for help designing your garden. The visual impact of seeing the image of each flower card and laying them out based on the description of each card. Easy instructions to follow so I was able to design and plan my garden!”
Mary Liz Lancaster
A participant of a recent Design Workshop at Rolling Green Nursery in Greenland, NH
“I found Elizabeth Dudley’s plant cards to be a fabulous way to lay out potential designs. They had just enough information on them to help me visualize where to place each plant according to the amount of sun it needed and its height and growth width, without being too overwhelming. I would highly recommend them to anybody trying to get a better understanding of where to place plants and flowers in their yard.“
~ Laura Cassinari King