Garden design - the best way to show off your plants

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I visited the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum last week and got a lot of good ideas for the garden. I'm a Graphic Designer by profession, so design and layout means a lot to me. The correct layout of your plants really shows them off, poor layout just makes them look sad.

The good new is that the cultural requirements of your plants (how much water, sunlight, etc. they need) will encourage good design, which is to keep similar shapes together. This area of The Tropical Paradise  gets a lot of sun and has sandy soil so it's a natural for desert shapes. I personally don't have a taste for cactus, which seems wildly out of place in a *tropical* garden, but aloes and agaves seem to work just right.

The first thing that you have to consider is that it shouldn't be all manicured and swept up. A Tropical Paradise isn't, and neither is a desert area. Your garden is not your kitchen floor and you shouldn't treat it that way. And remember that everything counts visually, from the lighting fixtures to the rocks.

In this little tableau, there is a Partridge Breast aloe at the far left combined with three different types of agaves. By the way, before you start planting agaves, check to see if they get really, really big and multiply. If they do, get a different kind! This is a fairly new planting and I want the plants to grow a little bit closer to each other, not look like someone should be hacking through with a machete!

The star of this show is the blue agave on the right, which is a Perry's Agave, which is available at most nurseries here in the Phoenix area. The co-star, on the left is the aloe, which gets just a little bit more shade than the agaves. The small agaves fill in the visual interest. Put the more jagged rocks higher up on the hill (this is an incline of about 20 degrees), and smoother rocks toward the bottom for a more natural look. The green leaves at the top of the hill are freesia, which transitions this area into the palms and cycads.
Desert shapes integrated in the garden

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