If you have a soggy spot in the yard where nothing you plant does well, you may be tempted to give up and leave it unplanted. "I don't want to go through the trouble of installing drainage or re-grading the site," perhaps you're saying to yourself. The good news is, you may not need to go to such lengths. But what you will need to do is develop a landscape plan specifically for wet areas.
I have presented a sample of such a landscape plan above. But if you observe wetlands in your own region, you can acquire enough ideas to develop your own landscape plan.
Some of these specimens you won't find at just any nursery. But if you conduct an Internet search for "wildflower society" followed by the name of the region in which you live, you may find someone who specializes in the sale of native plants in your area.
In the sample landscape plan for wet areas presented above, the pond serves as a backdrop for three rows of plants. The planting is "layered": i.e., the tallest plants reside in the back, the shortest in the front, and the mid-sized in between.
The wetland plants shown in the landscape plan are listed below, row by row:
- Back row:
- Middle row:
- Swamp milkweed, which is a good butterfly plant
- Elephant ear plants
- Front row:
- Wild bergamot and
- Marsh marigolds, both of which I cover in my article on water garden plants.
My sample landscape plan was drawn with the landscaping software named, "Realtime Landscaping Pro."
