We know this year’s unprecedented heat wave has put pressure on the plants in your yard. Many have opted for drought-tolerant plants, thinking this is the easy solution to keep their curbs lush and green. Soon, many discover with surprise that their drought-tolerant plants are starting to die.
Key Takeaway
The descriptor “drought-tolerant” often gives the misconception that these plants won’t ever die in extreme heat and drought conditions. In reality, many drought-tolerant plants become accidental casualties of poor landscaping design and drown to death because of thirstier neighbors. That’s why hydrozoning, a practice where plants with similar moisture demand are grouped together, can help prevent drought-tolerant plants from dying.
Drought-tolerant plants can die if planted near plants needing more irrigation
Hydrozoning is a landscaping design technique that groups plants with similar watering demands next to each other
Hydrozoning can prevent plants from dying of drought or overwatering
You added drought-tolerant plants. You water your yard regularly as you did before. Next thing you know, these low-water-demand plants aren’t looking too good.
What happened?
More often than not, your drought-tolerant plants die because of overwatering, not the heatwave.
Drought-tolerant plants are often highly vulnerable to overwatering. When you plant drought-tolerant plants next to anything that requires regular irrigation, the excessive water can damage the drought-tolerant plants and eventually kill them.
How Hydrozoning Keeps All Plants Happy and Alive
This is where hydrozoning comes into play. Hydrozoning is a landscape design technique that groups plants with similar water needs together, segmenting your yard into different “zones” by irrigation needs.
Hydrozoning comes with many benefits, including
Prevents plants from dying from overwatering caused by neighboring plants.
Reduces maintenance and water consumption since you can selectively water each zone instead of the entire yard
Works well with pre-programmed irrigation systems
Hydrozoning for Drought-Tolerant Plants
Look around your yard. You may already have natural areas perfect for drought-tolerant plants. Some of the best areas in your yard to turn into a low-watering zone are:
Slopes: Since water naturally runs off the slope, they can be perfect for plants that need less watering.
Southern & western-facing areas: With higher temperatures and lower water retention, southern- and western-facing areas can suit plants that do well in dry, hot conditions.
Awkward areas around your lawn: Think of that tiny strip between your sidewalk and the public street. They can be ideal for drought-tolerant perennials and shrubs.
What are Drought-Tolerant Plants
Drought-tolerant plants can handle heat and dry conditions with ease. They still need watering, just not as much as your “regular” plants would. Sometimes drought-tolerant plants are also called hardy plants, although they’re not completely the same – not all drought-tolerant plants can do well in the winter
Below, we’ve selected drought-tolerant plants for typical plant beds in your home. These plants do well with little water once they’re fully established.
Best Drought-Tolerant Perennials for Your Home
Kansas City has many beautiful perennials that are hardy and lovely to look at. Here are some of our favorite drought-tolerant perennials to add to your garden beds:
Kansas City has a climate suitable for a variety of hardy bushes and shrubs, many of which are also drought-tolerant. Here is an extensive list of drought-tolerant shrubs to add to your landscape:
Ninebark (Physocarpus opulifolius)
Fragrant Sumac (Rhus aromatica)
Juniper (Juniperus spp.)
Lilac (Syringa vulgaris)
Smokebush (Cotinus coggygria)
Spirea (Spiraea spp.)
Viburnum (drought-tolerant varieties)
Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus)
Landscape Roses
Yucca (Yucca filamentosa)
Best Drought-Tolerant Ornamental Grasses for Your Home
Ornamental grasses are pleasant to the eye and hardy enough to survive Kansas City’s many different weather conditions. Below are some of our favorite drought-tolerant grasses:
Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium)
Prairie Dropseed (Sporobolus heterolepis)
Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum)
Blue Fescue (Festuca glauca)
Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grass (Calamagrostis × acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’)
Pink Muhly Grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris)
Maiden Grass (Miscanthus sinensis, non-invasive cultivars)
Best Drought-Tolerant Trees for Your Home
If you are hydrozoning an existing landscape, you may want to keep trees and some shrubs in a separate watering zone. If you’re planting new trees, simply fit them into the proper zoning area.
Below are some drought-tolerant trees to add to your landscape in your Kansas City home:
Yes, although we recommend working with a garden care specialist to hydrozone an existing landscape for the best efficiency. You will want to begin by assessing what’s already there, categorizing it into different zones, and making adjustments accordingly. The process demands specific knowledge and can be labor-intensive if things need to be moved around, which is why it’s best to work with a professional.
2. How to get started with hydrozoning?
Start with what’s already there: where your downspouts are, where water runs off to the sidewalk, where snow gets piled up over winter, and parts of your lawn that tend to dry, or get burnt by the sun. They will help guide you in placing the plants by their irrigation needs.
Planting your trees is only the beginning. To keep your landscape happy, the homeowner should take the initiative to learn about tree health. This guide will walk you through why it’s important to start training your trees early and the different components of the training process.
What is Tree Training
Tree training is a set of methods that direct the growth of your tree so it forms specific shapes. Common training techniques include selective pruning and limb positioning. Tree training goes beyond aesthetic improvements. It also makes the trees healthier and thus grow more efficiently.
The Importance of Early Tree Training
Trees are more similar to humans than one might think. You wouldn’t consider education unimportant. Instead, you’d probably want your kid to start learning as early as possible, so they can develop in a healthy, stimulating, and creative way.
The same goes for trees. Young trees are more adaptable. Therefore, early training is more efficient and yields more lasting effects by building out a structure your tree would “memorize.” By doing so, you can significantly reduce the risk of structural issues as your tree grows.
The first and most popular method for early-age tree training is selective pruning. By cutting away weak, crossing, or crowded branches, you provide a negative signal against unwanted growth to the sapling:
“If a branch grows like this, it will get cut.”
This information becomes embedded in the tree so it grows in a strong, stable pattern. This way, you can prevent future interference or breakage from early on.
Important selective pruning tips include:
Create a single, dominant central leader: a clear main trunk provides overall stability and a balanced canopy.
Avoid excessive pruning: Overpruning may stress the tree and therefore slow the growth.
Make central cuts during dormant time: Pruning at the wrong time can stimulate undesirable growth or expose the tree to disease.
Handling Co-Dominant Leaders
Co-dominant leaders occur when trees have more than one main trunk of similar diameter. When main branches compete against each other for dominance, they create weak unions known as “bark inclusion,” where tree barks become trapped between main branches where they meet. Bark inclusions make the branches prone to splitting under wind or weight.
How to Prevent Co-Dominant Leaders
Early intervention, often known as “subordination pruning,” is key to snipping co-dominant leaders before they develop further. In subordination pruning, you select the “leader” you’d like to keep, and only prune from the other leader. With a few years of consistent work, you will notice more growth in the desired leader while the other branch remains small.
Raising the Canopy
To raise the canopy, you will remove lower branches strategically to keep the tree healthy while maintaining a strong overall shape. By doing so, you then encourage the growth of taller branches, quite literally raising the height of the tree’s canopy.
There are many benefits to raising the canopy:
You get better visibility around large trees.
Higher canopies are less likely to interfere with movements below the trees, allowing you to enjoy your landscape more fully.
A higher canopy also allows better airflow around and under the trees.
Taller canopies provide better shading from the sun than lower ones of similar size.
Flowering trees with taller canopies may cause less severe allergy reactions
Fertilization Considerations
Different types of fertilization have different effects. Knowing which type to use can help you provide the most suitable nutrients for your landscape at the right time. Proper and timely fertilization is a crucial step in turf care.
Many use high-nitrogen turf fertilizers because they encourage fast leafy growth in grass. However, too much nitrogen can affect your trees negatively, leading to weak growth or pest issues, and may interfere with natural structural development.
To mitigate negative effects from turf fertilizers, consider using sulfur-based fertilizers to help balance soil nutrients. Sulfur-based can support healthy tree growth without yielding overly soft or weak shoots in your lawn.
Trees self-manage in natural environments like woods and forests. They shed weak limbs and climb up for better light exposure. However, your residential landscaping setting rarely provides the same conditions for automatic tree training to happen.
Trees in a residential landscape face numerous challenges, including:
Harsher competitions
Limited growth space
Interference from human structures
Providing tree training can help your plants navigate their surrounding environment and learn to grow in a healthy and functional way as early as possible.
Where to Get Tree Training Services in Kansas City
Tree training is a highly specialized, expert-level landscaping service and should be performed only by knowledgeable, experienced specialists. As with finding a good tutor for your little ones, you should work only with professional tree and garden care companies in Kansas City with proven expertise in tree training.
Here are some things to look for if you’re looking for a tree training contractor:
Check and see if the company has a dedicated tree-caring program
Fall pruning season often starts with leaf fall. Pruning properly helps trees stay healthy, controls or directs growth, and cleans up after a wind or snowstorm. Not pruning can harm your trees long term by creating codominant leaders, and create structural issues with the trees long term habit.
How to make pruning cuts. Photo courtesy of Missouri Extension.
How To Make Pruning Cuts
First, let’s talk about the proper way to make a pruning cut. First, cut upward on the bottom of the branch to be pruned about a few inches out from the branch collar. The branch collar is the donut-shaped ring where a branch exits the trunk. Cut up about a third of the way through the branch. Then, on the top of the branch, cut about an inch or two further out from the trunk than the undercut. Finally, trim the cut to just outside the branch collar. The undercut keeps the branch from tearing away from the tree and damaging it in the process.
Controlling or Directing Growth
Trees need pruning when young so that they develop the proper shape and grow strong branches. First, remove any sprouts near the ground, often called suckers. Next, remove any fast-growing vertical sprouts from the branches. These are often called water sprouts. Next, cut any branches that are rubbing on another branch.
Finally, cut anything growing inward. These cuts should leave your tree with an open structure with branches that are strong. The open structure lets air and light into the center of the tree, helping to prevent diseases. It is best to remove no more than 25% of the tree in one pruning season.
Trees should never be topped. This way of pruning is destructive to the tree’s health and appearance. Crape myrtles are often topped. We refer to this as “crape murder.” Topping should be unnecessary if you take care to plant the right tree for a given space and prune it with intention to fit the space.
Pruning for Health
Check all the branches of the tree for disease or pest damage. Remove diseased or damaged branches to stop or slow the spread of disease. Remove branches that may fall on a structure or block a sidewalk, so they do not injure someone.
Proper pruning helps prevent storm damage.
After Storm Damage
Proper pruning helps prevent storm damage. Sometimes, however, even properly pruned trees are damaged by big storms. Removing broken branches promptly after a storm, regardless of the time of year, helps the tree heal. Broken branches can allow disease causing fungus or bacteria to enter the tree. These branches also detract from the appearance of the tree.
We Can Help
Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping has found that many people are afraid to ruin their trees by pruning the wrong way or they simply don’t have time to prune. If you enroll in our garden care subscription, we will help take care of pruning your ornamental trees and shrubs for you. If you have larger canopy shade trees that need help, we partner with several certified arborists in town to help with the bigger jobs. Call our office at (816) 825-2524 or visit our website www.RoyalCreationsKC.com to get help with your pruning needs.
Bagworms are a real threat to both evergreen and deciduous trees and shrubs. They are unsightly and weaken the host plant. Bagworms attack many species of trees but prefer evergreens. They defoliate the tree they live on, damaging it or even killing it if the infestation is severe.
Description
When the caterpillar hatches, it crawls out of the bag it hatched from. Bagworms start weaving their own bag immediately. The silk is covered in plant debris and can be hard to see when the bagworms are young. Most people start to notice bagworms in August and September when they are one to two inches long.
Life Cycle
The larvae hatch in May and early June. They grow through the summer and continue to add organic matter to their bag for camouflage. In September, the bagworm attaches its bag to a twig. The bags look like Christmas tree ornaments all over the tree.
In the fall, a female bagworm is ready to mate. She has no wings or legs and is inside her protective bag. The males hatch in September and crawl into the bag and mate with the female. She lays 100-200 eggs inside the bag and dies. The eggs overwinter in the mother’s bag.
Control
The most practical method of control is to pick the bags off the tree and crush them, then throw them in the trash. Removing the bags not only kills the eggs and larvae within, but it also prevents that generation from reproducing more bagworms.
The bag around the caterpillar makes chemical control difficult. Chemicals need to be applied to the foliage, not the bag. Spraying a pesticide on the tree that the caterpillar will ingest along with the needles or leaves of the tree is the best way to kill them. The younger the caterpillar, the easier it is to kill it. By August, the bagworm is mature and is not feeding much, so chemical control is unlikely. Don’t waste your time or money on chemicals then.
Both Bacillus thuringiensis and Spinosad will control young bagworms when applied to the foliage. These pesticides are allowed in organic gardening. Products containing acephate, cyfluthrin, or permethrin are also effective chemical control agents when applied to the foliage in early summer. Wet the foliage completely with any pesticide you use, or you will not get good coverage.
We Can Help
Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping customers will be relieved to know that we can treat trees for bagworms. We have the proper equipment and know-how to safely spray every inch of your tree or shrub to kill bagworms before they defoliate your plants. To subscribe to our garden care program, call our office at (816) 825-2524 or schedule a consult.
It is almost Mother’s Day and that means it is time for seasonal color. Instead of a bouquet of flowers that quickly wilts, you can give the mom in your life a planter full of seasonal color. We can even swap out the plants in the planter up to four times a year for year-round seasonal color. Here is what you can choose from for your planters.
Just the Right Size
We have four sizes for your seasonal color planter. Small is less than 16 inches in diameter. Medium is 17-21 inches in diameter. Large is 22-27 inches in diameter. Anything over 27 inches in diameter is considered custom. You provide the planter in the size you want, and we will fill it with potting soil, fertilizer, and plants.
Pick Your Pallet
You can pick the color pallet that you like from a selection of complementary colors, monochromatic, polychromatic, or analogous colors. Our plant specialist will design a planter with the colors you choose.
Container Styles
We have five container styles for you to choose from. The Dynasty planter has a classic, symmetrical evergreen plant in the center with annuals all around it. The Renaissance planter is asymmetrical and organic looking. It has an evergreen and annuals as well. The Noble planter has a wispy grass as the centerpiece surrounded by annuals. If you want something colorful from the tropics, order the Crown Jewel planter. The Chateau planter has both mounding and cascading annual. We can also custom design a planter in a different style for an additional cost.
Specials
When you order two containers, you will receive $25 off. For three or more containers, we will give you $50 off. If you sign up for a two-season swap you will save 10% while a four-season swap will earn 15% savings. Let us know if you want to set your properties colorful planters on Auto-Pilot with our subscription programs.
Watering Your Planters
Planters will need to be watered often, especially in the summer heat. To make keeping your planters watered and healthy easy, we can help install drip irrigation from your existing sprinkler system as an additional service.
Curb appeal is how good your house looks from the sidewalk. A 2010 study showed curb appeal accounts for 7% of a home’s value. in a soft market, that amount goes up to as much as 14% of a home’s value. Increase your home’s curb appeal by following these tips.
Replace Overgrown Shrubs
Shrubs that have grown too big for the space they are in can make your home seem smaller than it is. Replace such shrubs with native and adapted shrubs that will be the correct size for the spot they are in when grown. Other than trimming out dead or diseased branches, you should not have to prune a plant to fit in a space. Native plants tend to require less water and other care than nonnative plants. Check out our favorite shrubs here.
Add Annual Color
Annual color can really make your landscape beds pop. Now is the time to add all those amazing colorful annual flowers to your yard. Adding some now means they will look nice for Mother’s Day. Keep in mind that it is a couple weeks early to be sure of a late night frost, so if they are summer heat loving annuals, there could be a chance to have to cover them but by Mother’s Day we are usually in the clear from any threats of overnight frost.
Plant Now
If you need to replace plants that are too big or just aren’t doing well, you need to do that now. In a month or so, it will begin to get hot. Transplanting a plant is hard on it. While fall is the ideal time to transplant perennials and shrubs, spring is the second-best time to do that. Roots can get established before the full heat of summer arrives, and your watering commitments will be less with the spring rains.
Refresh Mulch
Adding an inch or two of mulch around trees and shrubs and in landscape beds can make them look much neater. The mulch replaces the amount that decayed over the year and works to prevent weeds from invading your landscape beds. It also keeps the soil cooler and moist, so your plants don’t have to work so hard to survive.
Lighting
Lighting can be used to accent the positive parts of your outdoor space while hiding the less favorable features. A house that has appropriate lighting looks warm and inviting. In addition, the extra light helps with home security.
Clearing Clutter
A neat yard increases curb appeal the same way a neat inside increases how nice a home looks. Make sure hoses are neatly rolled up, mowers are in sheds, and other tools are put up. Nobody wants to dodge tools when walking around the yard.
Garden Care Your Way
Royal Creations Architectural Landscaping can help you increase your home’s curb appeal. Enroll in our garden care program and we will replace bad looking shrubs, spread pre-emergent on the landscape beds, and add mulch where it is needed. We make sure the landscape beds look their best. We can also test your lights and make suggestions for the best way to light your landscape. Just call the office at (816) 825-2524 to enroll.
