Landscape Photos to Guide Your Spring To-Do Tasks

Taking landscape photos at all times in the year can help with garden planning and with your spring to-do list.

Once the snow clears and before green shoots pop from the earth, documenting the state of the garden with a camera makes a lot of sense. The health of trees and shrubs can be assessed easily through the lens, and put into “memory” through a photograph or two. Spring to-do may later involve pruning to get these beauties back into shape, and photos will guide you to what needs help. The state of the soil will be obvious, even if frozen. You will see where erosion has left you with too little earth in some beds. You will be alerted to an overabundance of earth atop such things as Iris rhizomes… not good if you want blooms. Spring to-do tasks become clearer when you have a clear picture of what is lacking in one spot and spilling over, ready to cause problems, in another.

I take more garden-related photos than the digital storage on my computer can handle, but most are close-ups of flowers. Close-ups permit us to see plant structure beautifully, and they are just plain pretty. But it is the wide-framed landscape photos that are more helpful in getting a handle on spring to-do and other tasks.

I realized this when I saw some over-the-seasons and over-the-years pictures of one part of my landscape: a low rock wall that elevates a broad raised bed, plus bordering beds below the wall. Most years my spring to-do has involved applying pre-bloom fertilizer and mulch before tulips and daffodils have emerged. Phlox subulata which I had inherited and loved went from looking good to looking tired, so I pulled it up one spring after (limited) bloom. I substituted Hostas. (Granted, Phlox likes sun and Hostas, shade, but it worked). But seasonal pictures and pictures taken year after year showed that my spring to-do tasks were not cutting it.

I had obliterated the rock wall, beautiful in its own right, with tall plantings in the lower bed. The stones could not serve as contrast to the flowers, for they no longer could be seen. I had elevated the raised bed so high with the Hostas that airspace between their tops and the low branches of an Ornamental Plum growing in that same bed became non-existent. I had made things worse while trying to make them better. And I never would have known, if a series of landscape photos had not told the tale.

I viewed my photos late last summer, and this realization influenced my fall to-do list, just as it will influence my spring to-do. Last fall, I dug up the Hostas for transplanting to a more appropriate spot. I weeded and aerated the soil where they had been. I purchased new Phlox subulata in time for it to settle in before first frost. Spring to-do will involve fertilizing the Phlox before and after bloom, adding compost to areas that look barren in pictures, adding soil to spots where my Hosta removal left too little behind, as evidenced by small craters that are more visible in photographs than they are to the naked eye. And my spring to-do work of dividing and moving plants will be guided by older pictures that get me back to the look I want for this bed.

The photos told a tale of less is more. They told a tale of the beauty of garden structures such as the rock wall, no longer able to provide definition between flora and hard structure due to the excessive plantings I had built up in front of it. They told a tale of a few spring to-do blunders in which I had failed to feed my plants. And while I have a love-hate relationship with mulch (I always think I am attracted to the concept of using ground cover plants as green “mulch”), my landscape photos showed two years when no finely ground dye-free mulch was applied. That was a spring to-do task that went by the wayside, and the resulting garden look was just plain “blah”, with no way for my plants’ colors to “pop” against a dark base.

This year, my spring to-do will include continuing to make up for my unintended transgressions of the past. I am taking photographs now, all frozen soil and not a bit of new growth yet evident. These photos can help me see more than my eye can about the state of the wall and terrain. Then, I tell you, I will happily take more landscape pictures during spring bloom when I can see the first rewards for my work, hot summer when things should be back in shape, and fall when I can assess where garden color might be needed. (I won’t add that color haphazardly. I will use my photos to guide me.)

As part of your spring to-do and before you get “doing”, take some garden landscape photos. You won’t be proud of them all, just as you might not be proud of a few of your own personal photos, (like the one in which you wore that retro outfit and thought it would be a hit in the 2020s…. Wait, that was me!) But they will tell a tale that is helpful in all that you do in the garden, come spring, summer, and beyond.