What should your yard look like? These are walkthroughs of real landscape plans: the layout decisions, the planting masses, the structure that carries a garden through winter. Every design comes with its full plant list.
The best-known guilds come with plant lists, and the lists get copied into climates they were never tested in. Three beds, from a Minnesota winter to a Sacramento summer, show which parts travel and which have to be redrawn.
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Every planting is a bet on three things: how big each plant finishes, what it contributes and when, and what the ground looks like in between. The sketch you make on planting day settles none of it.
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Permaculture's most reproduced diagram gets taught as a planting list, seven slots waiting to be filled. Read it that way and in ten years you will have shaded out five of them.
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Plantyd's sun analysis maps the light in a real native garden at year 1 and year 15: watch several hundred square feet of full sun turn to part shade as the trees grow, and see how the 26-species planting was designed for it.
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A whole home landscape design on one sheet: a butterfly garden, raised vegetable beds, a pergola terrace, a spruce screen, and a small orchard on a quarter-acre zone 6a lot, with the design moves worth copying in your own yard.
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