Tips on keeping your gardening resolutions

You've decided to improve your landscape in 2008, but you don't know how. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Go vertical. It's amazing how the addition of a few vertical accents makes a landscape much more interesting. An arbor or obelisk covered with vines, for example, adds a new dimension. For a striking exclamation point, plant a tall, narrow evergreen, such as Taylor juniper or Green Arrow falsecypress (Chamaecyparis).

• Try for an exuberant mixture of foliage. As our mixed plantings of evergreens and deciduous trees mature, we've been amazed at the pleasure we get from looking at the contrasting leaf shapes and shades of green of the trees.

Closer to the ground, the same thing happens with ornamental grasses and perennials when plants that have leaves of different sizes, shapes and colors pair up. The combination of a lacy-leaf fern and a narrow-leaf, colorful grass, for example, creates a pretty picture throughout the growing season.

• Plan a color scheme. An easy way to create a beautiful flower border is to limit yourself to plants that bloom in different shades of the same basic color, such as all reds or all pinks. Complementary colors, like purple and yellow, also work well. For pure elegance, you can't beat green and white.

• Give up the battle if grass won't grow. In difficult spots like under trees, shade-loving groundcover plants are easier to grow and look prettier, too. Plus, trees grow better when not forced to compete with grass. If you haven't tried groundcover plants yet, start with red barrenwort (Epimedium x rubrum) or Herman's Pride yellow archangel (Lamiastrum galeobdolon). I'm betting you'll soon be hooked and ready to discover the dozens of other great groundcovers that thrive in the Midwest.

• Dress up your retaining wall. To turn a bare wall into a landscape asset, plant at the top cascading perennials such as Blue Waterfall bellflower (Campanula poscharskyana) or creeping phlox. Consider also adding some woody plants that will drape over the edge. Some good candidates include Tom Thumb creeping cotoneaster, creeping juniper and wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei). Or add small shrubs at the base of the wall.

• Give up on duds. If a plant simply isn't thriving, you may be able to make it happy by transplanting it to another spot. Other times -say for a plant that has diseased foliage every year - it's better to simply dig it up and throw it out.

To make landscape maintenance manageable, I've recently banished a few overly aggressive plants. For me and many other plant lovers, giving up is hard to do - but sometimes it's the best thing for your landscape.

• Jan Riggenbach's column appears every Sunday. Write to her in care of the Daily Herald, P.O. Box 280, Arlington Heights IL 60006. Enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope for a personal reply.