Balance can be formal, represented as two equal or mirrored sides. Take a look at the the picture below.

If you were to take a ruler and draw a line down the middle of the picture, you would find that both sides are a mirror  image of the other. This is a very formal landscape design. Each side is counter-balanced by the use of the same plant materials, cut and shaped exactly the same. Color and texture are equal. All aspects of the landscape plants are proportional and focus the viewer’s attention. All parts contribute to the visual weight in a symmetrical landscape design. This is the type of design you might expect to see when there is a small yard to work with.

Another way to obtain balance is the use of an asymmetrical balance in the landscape design. This technique uses balance in a different manner to achieve the same visual weight achieved in a more formal design. Look at the house on the left. Do you see how asymmetrical design has been used to balance the landscape? The chimney and small evergreen tree are used to counter-balance the very large trees on the right side of the house. So in this case, smaller objects are used to add visual appeal, visual weight, to larger objects. This is a good example of how you can use different sized objects to create an overall sense of balance to landscaping solutions.

Asymmetrical balance may be considered more natural, it is probably more fun because it is not restricted to more regimented rules and styles of a formal design.

So, which is best? Actually, there is no “best” form of balance – it is the choice of the home owner and his or her particular situation and desires.  Choosing one over the other is often site dependent. A small house in the city may look best with a formal landscape design. Space is limited and does not lend itself to the more free-flowing concepts in a less formal setting. Larger yards could have the space for asymmetrical balance as well as country and woodland homes which are well suited to an informal landscape design. Whichever you choose, remember that you are looking for a design that results in visual appeal and appropriate visual weight in the eye of the viewer.

So, the 48 other master gardener candidates and I were exposed to a full day immersion of landscape design elements and principles – essentially a semester full of information packed into 8 hours of classroom instruction. Since there was so much to learn, I am going to devote separate posts to principles of design instead of covering them all in a single post. UNITY is the subject for today. Unity is a fairly simple concept, but somewhat harder to actually implement. A simple definition for unity is that “everything goes together.”

Unity can be achieved in many different ways. Grouping plants by size, repeating plants, color or texture can also contribute to creating unity in your garden. Advice from professional gardeners is that the best way to create unity in your garden is to have a theme and stick to it in you plant selection and design. Being faithful to your selected theme ensures that you don’t make visual errors in translating your plan into the reality of your garden. For example if you decided to use landscape rocks as a part of your garden theme and selected two large rocks, one round and red and the other square and white, you would create a unity problem when you got your garden planted. That is a simple example, but applies to the many choices you make about your garden design, plant selection, and accessories.

If you begin your garden design employing the principle of unity you will be miles ahead in getting the look and feel of a beautiful decorative home landscape.

In future postings we will look at other principles that will make your home garden a showplace in your neighborhood.

Our class this time included a field trip to Harris County’s Mercer Arboretum and Botanical Park. Mercer is a 200+ acre park dedicated to horticulture featuring both formal landscaped areas and natural areas. The park has just recently

Twin Cypress Trees on a small paved island

dedicated Storey Lake in the back of its property. The people who named this “lake” really had grandiose visions – it can’t really be considered a lake, more along the lines of a pond. You can see from the picture that it is a beautiful area, peaceful and serene. It is in the back of the property and away from where much of the crowd of visitors normally would be. If you get a chance to visit be sure to bring a camera. It is a spot of natural beauty and it is easy to something of interest to capture on film or digital card as a permanent memory. You can see from this picture that we are in the dead of what Houston calls winter. Lots of brown, some evergreen, but not a lot of color. Visit this later in the spring and you can expect to have a beautiful back drop of floral colors add beauty and vibrant colors to  your pictures of the lake.

As payment for our tour through the park we had two classes. The first covered ornamental trees and shrubs suitable for the Houston area; the second was about annuals that grow best in the seven county area surrounding Houston. I thought this was great since I hadn’t started selecting the floral plants I want to put in my garden. This not only gave me some ideas about what to select but also might be able to save me some money. I could see where I might easily buy plants that stand no chance of doing well in our summer heat. Below are just a few samples of recommended plants;  fortunately we have a wide variety of colors and plant types to choose from:

Agapantus "Giant Blue"

Albizia julibrissin

Lily and Petunia

Ochna serrulata

There are a lot more good choices for spring and summer color, but this will give you a good idea of the variety available and suitable for Houston’s high summer temperatures.

You can learn more about Mercer Arboretum and Botanical Park by visiting: http://www.hcp4.net/mercer/index.htm

I experienced another on my volunteer workdays which was quiet an experience. Interns are required to work in every aspect of gardening – floral, bog garden, orchids, vegetables and any other areas you could possibly think of. Today was my turn with the floral group. Just my luck, they were building new beds for a beautification project at the office. Not just a small decorative bed but the length of the entire building!

Besides tilling and composting the two beds (separated only by the walkway) we also have to lay down a small retaining wall of decorative bricks. You can see from the picture these are not your everyday, garden variety square bricks like you would see used on a house. NO, these suckers are about three times bigger than standard bricks and (I swear) FOUR times heavier. At least my back thinks that.

Now my idea of putting garden bricks down was simple. Clean out the area where the bricks will be laid, level them by eyeball and start stacking till you get the height that you want. Guess what, that’s not how a Master Gardner would go about the process of building a retaining wall. We had guys working on the construction crew (yep, that’s another area available to volunteer in) bring over their surveyor transom and actually surveyed the wall in. They found the low spot and then the high spot. We can now start putting in the retaining wall and do it professionally. I found the process begins with building the wall from the low spot first. You build to the height you want, then start filling out until the wall is complete.  Silly me, I would have started at one end and laid brick upon brick until I reached the other end. Obviously, as an intern I have a lot to learn.

I have no pictures of the finished product, we are just starting work, but here’s a picture of what we hope it will look like when finished – three rows high and LEVEL. I wonder if the people who put this in surveyed theirs or just used the calibrated eyeball technique? When the time comes around for my next workday maybe someone will have already completed building the retaining wall and I won’t have to deal with lifting decorative bricks. A guy can only hope!

Last weekend I began my Master Gardening servitude (oops, I mean my internship) by volunteering to work the annual fruit tree sale. The people in the master gardening program had done this many times before and everything was set up, organized and ran like clockwork. I was told by more than one of the “old-timers” that this was the largest crowd they had ever had for this plant sale. The advertising volunteers really did a great job of getting the word out – more than 800 people showed up to buy all kinds of fruit and berry plants. The list of plants make an orchid owner’s eye gleam with joy.

Plants for sale include:

• Apriplum
• Plucot
• Peaches
• Plums
• Nectarines
• Cherries
• Apple
• Pears
• Persimmons
• Pecans
• Blackberry and,
• Blueberry

So, there was something for everyone.

As a service to customers, volunteers would prune their purchases and this was a station I found particularly interesting because I discovered that there were different pruning techniques for different trees. Stone fruit (peaches, plums and other fruit with a pit or stone) were pruned differently from central leader plants (apples, pears or persimmons), and pecans different from both.

After talking to some of the pruners, here is what I learned about pruning stone fruit.

1. Very important! Let the customer know what you are going to do before you do it. Pruning stone fruit trees is a drastic cut. If the customer is not informed that after pruning all they will be left with is a “straight stick” after the pruning process they can tend to get really, really upset. Especially after they just spent a great deal of time examining all the peach trees available and picked just the very best one to take home and stick in the ground.
2. Master Gardeners are taught to wipe their pruning shears with an antiseptic before pruning the next tree. This is to prevent transfer of possible disease or harmful pathogens from one plant to another.
3. Now the fun begins. The pruners take off all the side limbs leaving only a straight stick 32-36 inches above the roots. Pruners who forgot Step 1 are likely to find themselves in a fight with the customer.

You can see from Figure 1 the end results of what pruning a new stone fruit tree planting looks like. Pretty drastic!

Pruning central leaders is a little less traumatic for customers. Steps 1 and2 above are the same, but when you are finished the plant will still look like a tree. The pruner is simply shaping the new plant.

First, remove the limbs close to where the ground level will be, several inches up to 6 inches is a good start. From that point forward all the remaining limbs are trimmed back approximately 1/3 of their length and about 1/3 of the total height of the tree is also cut back.

From this diagram you see the proper method of pruning a central leader tree – 1/3 is taken from the height of the tree and 1/3 from all the side limbs. If you forget Step 1 here, you are less likely to get in a fight with the customer, the end results still looks like a tree.

Pecans were simple. Yep, Steps 1 and 2, then just remove 1/3 to 1/2 the total height of the tree. Easy enough that even I could prune pecans.

All in all it was a fun day. I met a lot of nice people, learned one or two new things and got my volunteer hours started. For those who bought new trees, I hope they grow well and bare sweet and juicy fruit.

In the continued chronicling of my journey to become a Master Gardener I’ve had a whole new education on what I have for years thought of as dirt. And the big revelation is that I didn’t know what dirt actually was! But I sure found out and now armed with new knowledge I can confidently hold my own with anyone when the topic pops up in any social event.

I learned that dirt is simply “misplaced soil”. That stuff you get on your shoes and track into the house, that’s dirt. The soil you get on the knees and seat of your pants after working in the flower beds or garden, that’s not soil, its dirt.

Now that's dirt!

See, dirt is soil that has been misplaced. And if you always keep that definition in mind you to will be able hold soil in one hand, dirt in the other and tell them apart. That’s really useful because generally soil is a good thing while dirt is usually a bad thing. Getting rid of dirt can save a lot of money and housework so you can have more time to work in the soil.

Just to test your knowledge, the picture I posted would be classified as _______________________?

Yep, you got it. This is definitely dirt.

After more than a little thought I’ve decided to try my hand at gardening – not just run of the mill, every day gardening, but getting certified as a Master Gardener! One thing I found out quickly was that even though we may be called “Interns” (it is really much like my a graduate assistant program when I was chasing my doctorate) it borders on being “slave labor”. To earn the designation of Master Gardener candidates have to spend every Tuesday and Thursday in January and February in class which is ok. The slave labor part comes in by having to commit to 60-hours of volunteer work around the gardening center!

They keep telling me that it is a lot of FUN! Our first fun session was on composting with one part on keeping worms in your bed room. I have to admit the instructor had a great sense of humor and really did present a great class on how to start a back yard compost project. I can easily see her running around her neighborhood on weekend grabbing bags of grass cuttings and leaves to add to her compost and making black gold. I still haven’t decided if I want to start a compost pile or just go buy it when I need it. I guess a lot more research is called for.

So this blog will be a journal of my experiences in this class. It will be fun and I hope I can document my progress in going from a person who has a black thumb with skull-and-crossbones imprinted to one who will develop not one but two green thumbs.