Landscaping Ideas for Sunny Corners

Sunny garden nooks and corners offer venues for mood-setting displays of favorite plants and garden accents within the larger landscape. Entry garden corners created by the front porch welcome visitors year-around and backyard corners create opportunities for seasonal interest. Furnished corner garden rooms utilize small spaces for outdoor meals, socializing or sunbathing. Make practical use of a sunny corner with an edible garden of ornamentals and herbs.

Design and Location Considerations

Incorporate elements of line and form to create a pleasing corner with taller plants toward the back, medium-height plants in the middle and lower plants in front, varying textures and staggering heights to avoid a rigid stair-step effect. Employ garden features such as boulders or statuary to add textural and linear interest to plant groupings. Remember that the structure forming the corner can create micro-climates that affect plant growth. Block walls produce enough radiant heat to alter temperatures, whereas corners formed by plant hedges may hold moisture. Above -ground porches and decks that lack foundation siding allow cooling airflow around plants.

Corner Garden Rooms

Create a corner garden room to suggest a mood, complete with furnishings. The physically separate nature of a corner allows pleasant deviation from the overall landscaping for a theme within a theme. Tuck a cheery cottage-garden nook into an otherwise formal landscape, with a collection of colorful flowers and comfy, overstuffed chairs. Soothe a sunny patio corner with a Japanese container garden collection of heavenly bamboo (Nandina domestica), bonsai and Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) in glazed pottery. A corner landscaped for sunbathing needs only a lawn recliner and privacy shrubs. Japanese maples succeed in U.S Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 5b through 8; heavenly bamboo is for zones 6 through 9.

Water Features

André Le Nôtre, landscape designer for the gardens at Versailles, incorporated both reflecting and splashing water features in his grand schemes. With sunlight sparkling on the water's surface, a fountain, pond or waterfall utilizes the best features of a sunny corner. Ready-made kits make installing water features of nearly any size a do-it-yourself project for the handy homeowner. Sun-loving plants create a natural setting surrounding ponds, miniature waterfalls and fountains. Even a modest corner designed around a simple birdbath provides a sense of refreshment.

Herbs and Edibles

A sunny corner landscaped with culinary herbs, garden vegetables and edible flowers surprises and delights onlookers while making practical use of landscape space. An edible garden benefits from the same accents, such as boulders, statuary or water features, and design principles, that enhance a flower bed. A sunny corner near the kitchen makes for handy snipping. Include annuals, such as nasturtiums, dill and cilantro, and perennials such as the Mediterranean natives for USDA zones 5 to 9, lavender (Lavandula spp.) and rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis).