Question
Mark, I am in the Southeast, SC to be exact. I have a landscape designer I have been using for about three years.  She is taking a year off to be with her newborn.  I am currently working on a job that has a fountain installed in the very center of the yard. The fountain is approx. 8 feet tall with a basin approx. 8 feet in diameter.  The homeowner wants me to come up with some design ideas to surround this fountain.  I know I could hire another designer but I would like to give this a try myself.  Where would you suggest I look for ideas?  This is a new installation by the way.

Thanks,
Ron Spence

Answer
Ron,

If this was in a place I was working on...

1.  I would identify the one or maybe two main points of view that the fountain is viewed from, and plan(t) for those points of view--not for some symmetry that is evident only on a map with an overhead view;

2.  I would look around the existing landscape that is visible at the same time the fountain is ( from the points of view I picked earlier) and spot things that could work.  I figure the fountain is novel enough.  It doesn't need to be highlighted so much as it needs help blending in.  I would try to repeat plants already present;

3.  I would plant to make fountain maintenance easy.  Any other kind of planting ( too dense, too deep) will eventually get damaged by maintenance work, so I may as well plan on it now.  Also I'd watch out for messy plants, dropping stuff I wouldn't want to fish out or that could clog the pump/filter.

4.  With these things in mind, if I still don't have any plants picked out, I would head to a good nursery and wander around and see what strikes my fancy.  More often than not, there'll be a plant that I know but hadn't considered just waiting.

As you can tell, I work to try to make the campus I work at look a particular way all over.  Not uniform, but with smooth transitions from viewpoint to viewpoint.

Hope this helps some,
Mark in Portland