text: Drive around upscale new developments in your area, and look at how the professionals have sited foundation plants. Even the professionals don’t always get it completely right, but you will see a lot of the concepts I’ve covered in this post. Even if you live in a tiny cottage, still go and look at how the higher priced homes have been planted. You might not be able to do a full display like they have, but you might be able to isolate part of a grand design and adapt it to your own foundation garden planting scheme.
  Another thing I want you do is to take a picture of your house, blow it up, and then print out a few copies of it. With a marker or pen, using the concepts I’ve covered in this post, start drawing the shapes of the six classic foundation plants on your house’s picture until you come up with a planting scheme that you like. When I started making the drawings for this post, I drew out a few different planting options until I ended up with what I thought I would be presenting to you.
  Another thing I want you to do is to measure the exact length and width of the space where your foundation plants will be sited. When going shopping for bushes, look carefully at the tags to see how wide and tall a bush or tree will be at maturity. Knowing how wide each plant will be at maturity, space them out so in five or ten years, when they have matured, they will have formed nice shapes and are not all growing too close together. Too often people look at a small plant in a container and think they need more planting product than they really have to buy. A smallish plant put in the ground today, in three to five years might double or even triple its size.
  So there you have it, some ideas that I hope inspired you on planting foundation plants. I’ve written some other posts that I feel will also be of help, they are listed below.
  Just read your article on foundation planting and your examples are amazing. I’m not sure I “get it” for my own home though as its asymmetrical. Do you do custom designs?