How to Design Your Landscapes with the Mountain Meadow Design Philosophy

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Today we’re deep diving into the world of flower design! I’ll talk about the mountain meadow design philosophy, and how you can use it in your own backyard!
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▶️ Timestamps:
00:00 – Intro
01:07 – The History
01:53 – Mountain Meadow Design
02:25 – Skeleton
04:19 – Tendon
05:00 – Flesh
06:19 – Spacing & Variety
08:56 – Color Theory
10:57 – Outro
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Some images and videos were used from The Mountain Meadow Design written by Reese Nelson Ph D. as well as Temple Square Gardening by Christena Gates, Diane Erickson, Shelly Zollinger, and Larry Sagers.
Temple Square footage from yoshionthego2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZFc7a9tg7Y

You can read more about Peter Lessig here:
https://www.mormonwiki.com/Peter_Lassig
https://www.deseret.com/2015/11/7/20576206/temple-square-gardener-peter-lassig-created-beauty-and-touched-lives/

Genius behind Temple Square’s famed flowers dies

welcome to Garden Theory today we’re going to be diving into the world of annual flower design for many people designing with flowers can be a bit of a daunting task especially if you’re not an artistically minded set person but hopefully we’re going to help you be able to simplify as well as going into a brand new design style you probably never heard of before today we’re going to be talking about one of my favorite flower design methods which is called the mountain Meadow design philosophy probably never heard of it before it’s a pretty unique and and really cool method of Designing flow hour so we’re going to break it down today show you some real world examples of this design in action and how you can use it in your own home I first learned this design method while going to school at BYU Idaho I learned it there for my professors we used it when designing flower beds for the thomasy Ricks Gardens which is a 10 acre Garden space at the school so I was able to plant help with designing and maintaining the gardens there and it was a really fun and fascinating opportunity to be able to learn firsthand a little bit about the history of the gardens uh but if you want to skip forward to where we talk about it feel free to skip forward so it originally comes from a place called Temple Square which is in Utah and this design method was created over time by a man called Peter lassic and he used to be the head landscape architect over Temple Square for several decades starting in I believe in the 1970s and before his time Temple Square Was a Very Organized very formal English garden with very strict lines and the beds everything was very formal but he wanted to bring that Bring It Back To Nature I’ve been asked to discuss uh our philosophy for design we design with a philosophy that the the the end product the arrangement of the flowers uh that Arrangement must call attention to the Creator not the designer on Temple Square they try to make it as their flower beds look like as if Nature has scattered their seeds around you won’t find any straight lines there said you’ll find beautiful curves and explosions of colors however it’s not just a pure random mixing of plant there’s a core design to it and if you want to learn more about landscape design we did a whole video on it just a few weeks ago breaking it down into seven simple steps so if you want to learn more about how to do landscape design as a whole for your own home uh go ahead and watch that video and then come back here and his idea was that all design can be reduced to skeleton tendon flesh and so we found that if we budget 10 to 20% of our flowers to skeleton and 10 to 20% to tendon and uh 60 to 80% to flesh that we’ll always get an arrangement that has this wonderful sense of repose this wonderful sense of order this wonderful sense of hierarchy emphas balance unity all the basic principles can be honored by budgeting skeleton flesh in that way there the skeleton plants because of their dominance in the landscape either do through their size their height their bold colors their textures something that’s going to make them very visible the main focal point of the space and so they design these skeleton plants in a 2:1 ratio so two two skeleton plants will be closer and one will be farther away and they do this along a predetermined line or path that they make as they’re designing the space and a lot of times how they design it sometimes they don’t have a predetermined thing they have an idea of what they want and they kind of go along through the process as they fill out the space and with the plants that theyve prepared and some good examples of skeleton plants would be like blackhe Susans zenas so one way for you as a homeowner to get a naturalistic line is actually to use a garden hose in your flower bed you can lay it out in a path that is naturalistic in nature and then place your skeleton plants along it and then uh pull out your hose and that that’s an easy way that you can create a skeleton line that’s naturalistic in your own space and then next up is the tendon plants and the tendon plants go in after you have put in your skeleton plants and often time these guys will help to support your tended plants so a lot of times they’ll put one on the line and two off or two on the line and one off just sort of expanding that line often your tendons are going to be a little shorter and less dominant but they still play a critical role in complimenting the skeleton plants uh a good example of some good tendon plants that work well would be like salvas as well as copsis would be another really good tendon plants stuff that’s going to be a little smaller but still uh pretty showy and then so once your skeleton and tendon plants are laid out next is is going to be your flesh plants flesh plants is going to be the majority of the design some good examples of some would be like a ground cover Lilia patunas fbina s alysum lot of stuff that’s going to stay relatively low to the ground but they’re going to fill in all the natural spaces all the gaps are left behind after you’ve laid out your skeleton and tendon plants and they’re going to fill out the rest of the space and with the fles uh often times they include what they call a sparkle something within your fles that’s going to stand out against it just to help add a little bit more variety to your space you don’t want just like one giant patch of the same thing so think of any good Sparkle ideas usually it could be something with like maybe some warm colored flowers like red yellow or it could be something like dusty miller where it’s like a silver foilage that stands out uh but those would be some examples of a sparkle to put within your flesh another big proponent of the mountain meow design is having a large variety of plants wide variety of plants rather than a small variety of plants we get a much more exciting composition it’s kind of like saying how do you want your salad all lettuce or all radishes or do you want a properly composed tossed salad well obviously one tastes better than the other so Temple Square uh they try to do between 40 to 60 varieties of flowers per bed which can sound like a lot but they have much larger beds than you probably do at your own backyard so usually I would go for probably 10 varieties if you can that would probably help to give you a pretty good welld designed flower bed I think at the minimum with the mountain Meadow design and so how you calculate how many flowers you need is again we’re going to measure our space like we’ve talked about before in the landscape design video but for if you have a specific space in mine go ahead and measure that and if you have more of an irregular space just try to measure it the best you can if you can simplify it by just measuring a rough square or rectangle but we’re going to measure that and figure out what our square footage is so if you have more of a square rectangular space uh just times the length by width and that gives you your square foot if you have more of a circle or any other kind of unique shape you may need to look up the formula online to do that but once you have your square footage for the mountain metal design uh for annuals you do 1.5 to 2 annuals per square feet and then if you have any perennials in your space you do one foot per perennial in this design and so it leads to a pretty tight arrangement of flowers it helps to keep things looking full when you install it while still giving enough space for things to grow out I do want to be a little responsible with it uh especially if you’re choosing plants that are going to be bigger than that the way it works is uh these colus with the orange or rust colored leaves in this Arrangement tie it all together in a network that becomes the skeleton and then they’re they’re emphasized by the tubous ponas uh as part of that SK skelet F makeup and then next the shus of plants make up the tendon and the tendon starts tying it together and uh legitimatizing the skelet and finally uh the impatients make up the flesh which finally fill it all in together it’s very simple and then we also learned a very important other thing we have uh 160,000 flowers that we place in one week uh in planting time uh made up of uh of 470 varieties of flowers so let’s talk a little bit about color theory and color uh palettes and that’s a big thing that you might consider especially if you’re doing this for your own backyard is what color palettes work well in this design so there’s warm and cool colors warm colors are like yellow orange and red cool colors are green blue and violet and so a lot of times those two are going to contrast against each other uh depends on what kind of mood you want to set cuz different colors convey different emotions so cool colors can be a little bit more calming whereas warm color are going to be a lot more energetic and Lively and so it just depends on what your overall feel you that you want for your spaces you also have primary colors of course your red yellow and blues and then you have contrasting colors which is the color opposite from it on the color wheel so that’s like yellow and purple red and green and blue and orange and so you can use those I would use contrasting colors sparingly depending on the design we also can do complimentary colors so you can do a skeleton line that’s mostly pink maybe some tendons that are white and then your flesh is purple and so everything kind of feels good it flows together I’ve done yellow pink and green before and white and that’s a really good kind of pretty fun one pretty energetic I’ve done what I would call like a sunset color scheme where I go from yellow to Orange to Red to purple as I as I go from skeleton to flesh and so it kind of creates that kind of sunset color palette and I really like that one and a big part of the the philosophy behind the mountain metal design philosophy is to call attention back to God by using these naturalistic forms found in nature um and it’ll definitely help set your garden apart from the rest I think it’s a very unique and quite beautiful design uh really good way to set yourself apart from the standard cookie cutter grids of Suburbia something that I really enjoy doing I like to design most of my annual stuff and flower beds in this manner uh so I hope you all enjoyed this video I really enjoy this style of gardening and I hope you all enjoyed some of the examples I showed on screen and hopefully you feel a little inspired to do this in your own backyard I think that’s going to be it for today um and if you enjoyed the video feel free to subscribe and be notified for our next video but with that I hope you all have a wonderful rest of y’all’s day [Music] oh [Music]