What Is Naturalizing
What Is Naturalizing
Naturalizing is the process of creating a lawn and garden area for your home which is as natural to the surrounding area as it possibly can be. Many people use naturalizing garden techniques when they have an empty field as part of the property for their home, or when they have a very large yard area that needs color and texture in it quickly. Naturalizing is also a wonderful way to create a garden for your home which grows easily and requires very little care though.
Naturalizing can be quite helpful to use in areas of your yard and garden which are problematic too though. If for instance, you have a strip of dirt between the sidewalk and road in front of your home in which nothing seems to want to grow well, you can often plant flowers and plants there which are native to your climate, and they’ll thrive without you having to do much of anything to care for them.
And technically that’s what naturalizing is. You’re planting flowers, vines, shrubs, and other garden items which are natural to the area you live in. By doing so, you’re providing greenery, color, texture, and beauty that won’t take much time and attention for you to enjoy.
Planting flowers, bushes or shrubs which are natural to your area will allow them to thrive naturally on their own. Since these flowers and plants are native to where you live, then you won’t usually need to water them for instance, because they’re already adapted to the amount of natural rainfall your area gets.
The same applies for soil amendments and fertilizing too. If you plant flowers which are native to your area, you will not need to do anything to the soil first. In fact, if you do try to make amendments to the soil, you may find that your naturalized plants won’t respond well at all. This is because they naturally live and thrive in the default soil that’s already in your area.
There are really only two rules to creating a naturalized garden. And neither are hard and fast rules, but they do help make your garden look as natural as possible. The first rule: Plant things which are native to your area. This usually means you will plant wildflowers which grow naturally in your area, and any vines, bushes or shrubs which crop up around you naturally too. In some areas of the country, this may mean you’ll have primarily cactus plants, while in other areas a naturalized garden may have blackberry bushes or wild strawberries growing in it.
The second part of creating a naturalized garden is to make it natural. This is one of the difficult parts for many people, because nature is not always structured as orderly as we might like. Naturalized gardens are not laid out in tailored beds though, and they don’t usually follow the edge of your yard in an orderly and cultivated manner either.
Instead of planting flowers in specific spaces, naturalized gardens are usually started by scattering some seeds around an area. If you want to start with plants though, you can do this too. Simply try to plant them in a random, natural looking pattern so that as they fill in they’ll look like they cropped up there all on their own.
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