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0:00
See the three listed here. Click there okay. So this morning, thank you for joining me. I'm Anne Yasalonis. I'm the Residential Horticulture Extension Agent and Master Gardener Coordinator with UF/IFAS Extension in Polk County. And Julie Schelb our Florida Friendly Landscaping Coordinator and I offer all of these webinars, and we are assisted by Master Gardeners who are helping co-host. So they're the ones that
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are helping us in our chat and answering questions and muting you and looking at video and you know turning that off for people and everything. So when you came in, just check and make sure if you look at this slide here on the far left of that kind of black box in the middle of the slide it shows where you can be muted and unmuted and video on and off. So during the webinar it would be best that everyone's muted and their video is off, and they'll be going
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through and checking all of that for you. And if you have a question as far as you know I can't hear, is something's wrong with the screen, something like that if you can type that in the chat as we're going along they will moderate the chat for me there. And then I will take questions at the end. Now this one I will take questions at the beginning here in a few slides so we can kind of recap from last time. Then we'll move on and do the design principles and then at the
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end I answer questions on today's webinar. But really I don't want any other questions in the middle we'll get them at the beginning and end, but you're welcome to type them into the chat at any time. We'll have an evaluation today as well, so we will put that not only in the chat box at the end but I will email it to you and then we will also email out any links or anything that will help you out. I will try to remember to send the links from
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last time and from this time as well, because some of the stuff will overlap a little bit and help you out particularly if you weren't at the last webinar something like the design guide that will help you out this time as well. Okay. All right and we are recording these, we'll get you copies of slides and things at the end of the series. Okay so we are doing this series, it's three parts, to go from the beginning stages of learning how to look
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at your existing landscape all the way the final design. Last week we talked about site inventory and analysis and this week we're going to move forward into design principles. And so at this point, before we move into design principles does anyone have any comments or questions from last week's webinar on site inventory and analysis. That's a lot. So if you've started on it you may have questions or you may have just started and so you maybe have a
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couple weeks to work on that one still. But if you have questions on site inventory and analysis that we can answer now, you can type them in the chat or you can unmute. So there are some questions about sound. Sue, Chris can you hear me okay? I can hear you fine. Okay, yeah check your volume if that's it. Also I know Zoom is funny, so sometimes people have trouble joining through computer audio and you can call in by phone also to hear and see the slides on
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your screen. Sometimes you have to go out and come back in. I am not a Zoom expert so, all of those things I would try. And then there's a question about removing the attendee section. You can click out of any boxes. Such as the chat or the participants or even the kind of grids screen that shows everybody's faces and everything you can click out of that or even the participants one you can minimize it or or just focus on the speaker view just so you know.
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All right so if you have questions about inventory and analysis before we move on. Clearly if you remember them as we're going on, you can ask them at the end too that's not a problem. And yeah if you weren't it the first one, after the series is done we'll get you everything. And so again after today I'll send you all of the links to all the publications and plant lists and everything we talked about last time in addition to the stuff for today. So after
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the end of all three we'll get everything to you. Okay I'm gonna minimize my chat, unless anybody else has any questions and we'll keep going but again you can ask the questions later too not a problem.
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All right so today we're going to move on and talk about design principles. So design principles are the visual qualities that make up a landscape, both as to what people see and what they feel when observing the landscape. So we're going to talk about those, it's the more artistic side of landscape design.
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We'll have some good pictures today to demonstrate all this. So the first thing we're going to talk about is functional characteristics of plants. So this is basically what purpose are the plants serving, and they could be structural they could be focal or they could be massing and we're going to go through each of these individually. So here we have structural plants, so this could be trees or large shrubs something like that. So if you look in the picture here for example. What's
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providing the structure in this landscape? Well it's a very large tree. You know it's very prominent in the landscape, it's creating a space. We'll show some more examples here as well. So you can see how the tree is adding structure to the landscape. It's usually something large, prominent usually the texture and things combine with that structure. And these design principles all work together. So as we talk about structure and form and all of that
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it all works together to to give the landscape the look that the designer is going for. Focal points. Those can, the focal point your landscape can be done with a variety of different things. It could be done with color, it could be done with shape, it could be done with texture. Sometimes you'll hear someone say specimen plant and that's usually, there's always exceptions to all of these design principles for sure, but usually they'll say one prominent you
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know plant in the landscape. It's a singular plant that's capturing attention, and you can definitely tell in this picture what that plant is. You can tell which one has a unique color, there's only one of them, it has a very distinct shape and texture, and it's very prominent in this landscape here. So again you can see focal plants in this landscape, while not a singular plant, can be done in small massing groups as well. So this is a set of three, but again very
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prominent texture, shape, size. And you can see how these three plants here in the foreground look a lot different from the other plants in the landscape.
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Massing. So you can mass a lot of different plants in the landscape, and you should because with massing your unifying spaces. And you can do it for a number of different reasons. Maybe your unifying spaces by doing some repetition with massing. So again we'll talk about repetition later, but you'll see how these principles all kind of wind together in the landscape. And so here we've got massing plants in a very bright color, it's just this yellow flag
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rudbeckia here in this picture, And you can see by massing color, so massing using the same plant, that's our focal point here. So we went from a singular plant that had a very specific texture and shape and color, to three plants that were then our focal points, and now we're massing color to do the same thing. So we're doing some massing here, I guess we could say there's focal point and just massing for unity and cohesiveness in the landscape. So there's multiple
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things being massed here. And for the most part that's how you're gonna plant most things in your landscape and then have that specimen plant be your stand out a focal point. So here in the background this large set of three crinum lilies are massed, so there's three, that is a mass. In the front we have some perennials that are massed by color, most likely on the side. And in the front foreground here you can see some Indian Hawthorne, those are most likely
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massed as they normally are. But there's just different ways to see how color is massed, how different sizes and shapes of plants are massed together to create a look in the landscape. When we move into talking about color, there's different ways to use color in the landscape. Most people have some idea, and you might have done this in your site analysis where you kind of figure out what colors you like and you don't like in the landscape. I think if you're very unsure
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you could look at your neighborhood and your house style, even getting some ideas from how you have things inside your house, colors you like and don't like can be used outside. So typically warmer colors help appear closer and make a space feel smaller. And you can see how different colors are used here, these are warm colors yellows and reds and things like that in the landscape to give it a certain feel. And then the cool colors kind of open up the space make it feel
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distance, the space feel larger. And you can see there's a big difference between massing of warm color versus massing a cooler color as well. And typically we want to use a smaller amount of the brightest color, and again there's exceptions to everything for sure but we typically want to have a good balance of everything in the landscape. So balancing colors between foliage and flowers, and flowers and foliage, and flowers and flowers. So what
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I mean by that is, so if we go in these series of three pictures here you'll see there's different colors in that first picture on the left where the colors of the flowers coordinate with the colors of foliage. And then in the middle we can see the colors of flowers are coordinating with the colors of foliage, and then also just the colors of flowers together in the landscape. So we've got a lot of that going on in all three pictures. So in the
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far right you could see the little pink whirling butterflies coordinating with foliage color right, so and then on the one in the far left we've got foliage plants we've got purple foliage and green foliage but we also have yellow flowers and red flowers so there's lots of lots of color coordinating going on. And again you know what you like in the landscape, but these are some ideas if you need some assistance on ways that you can develop a color scheme for your
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landscape so. Monochromatic, if that's something you like, top picture there. So everything the same or similar color. That's pretty easy to do even with just greens. So you may have a monochromatic green landscape but if you vary the colors of greens a bit it adds interest. Analogous, so red; yellow; orange; and then complementary, so we're remembering back to our time of using a color wheel right. So opposite on the color wheel, orange and blue that's our example right, and
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then you can combine them in any way that that works for you as long as you kind of refer back to all of these principles. Again there's no correct way to do it, these are just good examples to give you a good appealing result for your landscape design. So then we move into line and how that is used in a landscape. Straight line and curving line pretty obvious there of different ways that we could use it. So for example here this is a landscape
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with lots of straight lines. Where as this is a landscape with a lot of curving lines. And again it just really depends on your style of home, your personal preferences, what you like, the structure of the plants that you like to use. I mean some plants even tend to lend themselves to a more structural, more rigid line quality than others that tend to be more drapey, and they have lines in them as well so. Again just an example of the ways that line is used in the
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landscape. And certainly with any of these you can combine them. You can certainly have areas where you've got straight lines and curving lines in the landscape that's not a problem at all. Form is the shape and structure of plants, and we're gonna go through and show you all of these different types of form. And I think just by glancing at this slide really quickly you can kind of get an idea of, okay this this plant tends to look more formal. So if we look
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at that columnar, which would be an evergreen plant there on that top left picture, the columnar or the pyramidal those look a little more formal right then maybe a weeping or a mounding type of a plant. But if you look at all those across the top there, and you see in that bottom picture how they're combined in the landscape you certainly can go for the columnar or pyramidal shape and look for your landscape to get a more formal look or you can go more weeping and
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spiky and vase shaped. But you can also combine them together to have a really attractive looking landscape. So looking at here at form, looking at massing. So this picture here shows asiatic jasmine as a ground cover, I think we talked about that last time. So ground covering shrubs you could get clumping or matting, spreading, sprawling, short spikes. Again it kind of depends on what you're looking for in your landscape, but those are some of the forms you would find in
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ground covers and shrubs. In individual plants, this might be something that you're looking for could be a specimen plant or focal point maybe the spiky or the upright could be that or just combining some of these together. Certainly you could have you know combination of three or four arching plants together in the landscape for sure. And looking at texture, this is important as we combine it with things like form. Because when you're combining texture with form you really get a lot of
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different looks of plants in the landscape. So coarse plants, may be a coarse plant with a spiky texture, you know that to me says tropical focal plant you know something really strong in the landscape. Where as if I'm looking at a fine textured you know perennial in a pollinator garden that's just a very different look, and you can certainly again combine them across different textures in a lot of really fun ways. So here looking at some of the
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coarse textured plants and their qualities. So with a coarse textured plants usually they have larger foliage, rough surfaces, maybe irregular shapes, spiky is very common, maybe thick branches, larger size, and you can see that in in some of these plants here. You know thick leaves, large shapes of leaves that sort of thing, rigid texture. Medium texture. So kind of an average foliage size, maybe this would be something that would be like a foundation plan that your massing throughout your
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landscape. Could have slightly rough textures, neither dense or open branching so you know just kind of that standard shrub in your landscape. So if you look at the picture on the bottom the shrubs. You can kind of see three of them on the left side, they're the schillings dwarf holly, would be a good example of you know just kind of the regular-sized shrub medium texture. And then in that same bottom picture there we've got a large fakahatchee grass that
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that really is more of the focal point and that medium textured plant kind of falls to the background. And with fine texture usually you see that more in your perennials. Thin strap like foliage, delicate flowers, delicate foliage, more thin stems, could be light and wispy, and I think you can see that from the photos there. So here you can see a combination of different textures used in the landscape, and just that you get a very different feel from those different
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textures. And also I mean as you look at these to think about form and color and all those how they impact the look of that landscape that you see. Perceived size of space. So this could be important if you're trying to do something particular in your landscape so. If you have a a a yard that you want to make a bigger or a big yard you want to make more cozy these things could be important to you. So larger when fine texture is far away. So if you look at
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the picture on the top right there, the the large shrub kind of the highest one on the left side is fine textured so it's going to make a space feel more open. Where as in the bottom picture when the coarse texture is furthest away from the the eye it makes a space seem smaller. So you can think about that as you're you know referring back to maybe some of the design work you've started, that you know oh I want to enclose this vacant space and make it feel cozy when
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I sit out here in the evening you know in a chair or something so okay maybe I need to choose my large shrubs with some sort of coarse texture that could help you make those decisions. In addition to that the size of the plant or object in the surroundings, and I think you can really see that in that that hand drawing there as far as enclosing a space or opening up a space and how that's used.
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And then going into unity. So you'll hear some of the things that we just talked about. So unity is really important in a landscape. I know I say mass plantings are repetition, and we don't want everything the same in the landscape right, but we have to have some sort of repetition or at least some small areas of mass plantings similar colors and textures in the landscape to tie everything together. So with our unity we can do that through mass plantings of
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the same thing repeating that throughout the landscape or even repeating the use of the same forms, the same textures, and the same colors. So you can group or mass several plants of the same species together instead of placing them separately in the landscape and then interspersed shrub areas with lower ground covers and trees. So again just something as simple as mass planting three ferns. Here coontie cycads are used a lot for unity. They are real easy because you can unify
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a landscape that kind of ranges from sun to shade because they do well in both sun and shades. So they're really easy to to mass plant in groups of three or six or even more in different areas of the landscape whether sun or shade. So this is a good example of a plant that works well for that, and there are certainly a lot more as well. Looking at balance. So symmetrical or asymmetrical what's your preference there, and again it doesn't matter it's just something that
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you can can look at when you're creating a design. It is important though that you do look at the proportions of the plant. So when we at the very end talk about about selecting plants for your yard it's really important that you look at that mature size of the plant that you're selecting. And you should be able to find that in all of our information in our plant guide, because you want to make sure that you've selected a plant that works well with the size of your
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property, the size of your house. This is showing a poor example in that we've got a really large tree right up against the house, so it does a great job making your house look really small. This would be a better suited tree for maybe along the back fence of this same property and something smaller would work here. So always refer to those sizes when you're selecting plants. We have a lot of transitions in the landscape, and you can see a number of them here in this photo
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as an example. So we have changes in color, and texture, and height. So again this picture shows all of them pretty easily. We can see the changes in height typically in the landscape, not always right. We have our lawn area and then we start with a lower ground cover and everything gets higher as we move to the back of the landscape. And it could be that the highest part is as get to the to the edge of the house
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right, or it could be to the edge of the fence, or to the edge of the property, or the middle of the landscape bed something like that. You can also see here the change in color in the way that it adds interest to the landscape, and you can imagine different colors in here. So this has very similar colors, those kind of red shades, but if you had one red and one yellow you'd get a different look or if everything here was a different shade of green. Or imagine even
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some different textures. We've got a lot of fine textures here, but what if that kind of second layer there was you know a very coarse texture it would look a lot different. Here's another example of transition. In that picture on the right you can see again our lowest point is our that brick walkway there and then moves up into a ground cover and then up into some ornamental grasses there. And you can see the different textures that are used and the different colors that
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are used in that to get a different feel of the landscape. So typically you'll see here those different layers: the ground cover the foreground, we have that mid ground of our maybe our shrubs or ornamental grasses that are a little bit bigger, and then our background which are going to be our taller shrubs. Here's another example of something very similar. Again the highest point here will be the fence, so then you can see how it steps down into that lawn space.
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When we look at repetition, so we talked about doing that with those mass plantings, I mentioned that coontie cycads are really good about that and the reason that we do that is to discourage clutter in the landscape. So it's fine to have you know fun plants, focal point, specimen plants, and that sort of thing but they really get lost in the clutter if you don't have those repeated plants the repeated you know massing of you know shrubs and that sort of thing. So
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it's important that you do a little bit of repetition in that landscape.
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Focalization is important. So with doing that we talked about the focal plants. You can do it in a couple of different ways. So drawing a viewers eye to the focal point in the landscape. If you think about people that paint their front door a bright color you want you know when you look at that house that's where your eye goes first right. And you can do that here. They've done it with repeating the standard crape myrtles on either side of the front door and then
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there's mass plantings of pentas, they're both you know bright red there so. They've kind of done this with a couple of different things, so they've repeated the plants, they've got that structural form, and then the color also helps with that focalization. So it doesn't have to be just one plant, you can do it in a couple of different ways which is interesting. You can also do it if you're going to be considering adding any garden art or ornamentation into the
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landscape. You can certainly do that to create a focal point and that's done here with a small sculpture. Here it's done with a couple of different things, which is interesting. So not only does it have that focal point of color right, bright yellow, but also that ornamentation as well so two things have created a focal point in this landscape.
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So as we work through these design principles, there's a few things we want to try and avoid. So this can kind of be your checklist. So after you're working through your design and thinking about combining things, you can refer to this before and then maybe after two you can go through and go okay did I do any of this okay I did I better go back through and you know double-check and take care of some of this stuff. So the first one would be over planting or planting to
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closely. And if we're drawing everything on our plan to scale, which we'll talk about next time, we will make sure that if we follow our plan that we are not planting to closely. So over planting or planting to closely can be a huge problem later, and that might be some of the reason that you have to do redesign now is because things are just too crowded and over planted. So when we're installing plants in a new landscape, they should not look how they should
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look in five years. That means they're to crowded now, there should be plenty of space in between them. To many different kinds of plants. I think as you start to move forward with your landscape design you'll start to notice where you have mass plantings. You could even do that, and remind yourself to do that through your design process by doing you know some shading of different color. So you know grab a green crayon or marker or colored pencil or something
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and say okay well I'm gonna make sure that I have my, for example, coontie cycads. I'm gonna put them out in this front bed, I'm gonna put them along the front of the house, and in this other area too, and you could just kind of shade sections where you know you want mass plantings to build those those focal points off of. The lawn cluttered with trees and shrubs. So if you have a lot of existing trees and shrubs or even are considering planting more, if you're taking kind of a
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look at your plan and what you have and see that oh in my lawn it's just there's a tree here here and here and they're kind of scattered all over the place. Ideally what would work best, not to remove them but to just kind of incorporate them into a larger mulch bed makes it a lot easier to maintain. It's a lot easier to mow around one big bed with a lot of trees in it versus you know 20 different small circles with trees in them it. Also kind of cleans up
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the landscape and makes it look a lot neater. Truthfully you don't even need to plant anything extra in it, it's just a you know larger mulch bed kind of encompassing all that existing stuff. Try and avoid those shrubs to tall for the structure like we just talked about. Also consider planting groups by their water needs. So we're not talking to much about irrigation in this webinar, but it is important to think that these plants will have to be watered. If you have an
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existing sprinkler system, your sprinkler system is broken up into zones and we want everything in this zone. So zone 1 waters in set amount right, and so if it's watering a set amount we want everything in that zone to require the same amount of water otherwise somebody's always getting under watered or over watered. So consider that as you're adding plants to your landscape and we'll talk more about plants next time. Try to avoid plants
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to close to the house. So your plan will help you with that too. Because you can draw those plants in, showing a significant space. So ideally what we want to do is have the mature size of our plant, we're drawing that mature size in right, even if we buy a one gallon plant that's six inches tall now we know it eventually will be six feet around. We want to space it so that when it's mature that the edge of the plant doesn't touch the house and is at least
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about 12 inches away okay. And then avoid bright colors scattered in the yard. So if we've done a pretty good job of creating unity and doing some mass plantings if you're doing any of that you know shading of your green foundation plants that you're gonna have everywhere. That'll help you kind of figure out okay well I've got got some areas shaded of green I know I have you know good areas where my landscape is going to be unified and look really neat,
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and here's where I can can place in some areas of bright color rather than having it kind of randomly scattered. And then additionally we want to avoid any narrow strips of grass. So if right now you're doing a lot of playing around with creating landscape beds and all of that, just double check your measurements and even you know going out into the yard and and doing some real-life measuring make sure you don't leave any areas. Again we kind of talked about this last
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time where either a mower can't access or it's so narrow like in this photo here, it's really hard to maintain and much less water a very small section of grass right there. It'd be better if you have a situation like in this photo, if you just kind of incorporate that tree into the landscape bed it's just makes maintenance a lot easier.
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