Spacing your trees, shrubs or plants can be a tricky job. Spaced too far apart and your contribution to the landscape can look underdone, amateurish and ineffective.
The biggest loser is the client - whether that is you doing your own garden or if you have been paid to carry out the planting for a project.
Get the plants too close together and the problems can be numerous. Competition for light water and nutrients will have a detrimental effect on the well-being of the plant and ultimately, the weakest plants become weaker and eventually they will be overtaken and possibly even die out.
Martyr planting is a common practice amongst designers and commercial landscapers. Deliberately plant too close and the instant effect is intensified the objective is to deliberately sacrifice plants. This is a well used tactic in the planting of show homes on new building sites or around shopping centres where a visual high impact is required. recommendation
Clients with big budgets are usually too impatient and will often demand mature plants. Many will insist that the soil is not seen - the immediate effect certainly has the WoW factor but in the long term, overcrowding and competition can destroy what should be a model display.
Try to think about planting for semi maturity or maturity. This means that in the early days, plants may seem less densely populated but as plants develop, they fill their space elegantly and never seem disproportionate to the its companion.
Planting so that there is a deliberate 'merging' of foliage on shrubs or smaller plants is quite acceptable and an extremely attractive way to set out the border.
However, if planting has been a little over liberal and badly planned, removal of plants that are spaced too closely can leave the remaining companion plants looking mis-shaped and even bare - conifers are a good example of plants that you have to space correctly because new foliage, lost through the lack of space and light, will never grow back.
The last consideration is expense. Take this line of Prunus Lusitanica - Portuguese Laurel. They plants are being used with the intention of forming a hedge to block the view to a new build.
With each individual shrub capable of reaching a spread of six to ten feet (depending on time-scales) and a height of up to twenty feet, the plants have been planted too close.
The gardener here has potentially paid double what he needed to and there is a very good chance that several plants will succumb to the stress of being so close and the competition will either disfigure, stunt or kill the weaker ones.
The alternative, would be to remove the centre plants and form a second row behind or front and stagger the plant spacings. This does mean that you need a bit more space but the density of the screen is better.
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