A woodland generates a subtle hush and a reminder that nature is indeed awesome. It has atmosphere, personality, and four-season interest; will last for generations; and tempers the surrounding climate. It can add to your property value... but more importantly, it will add to your quality of life.

A woodland can be an antidote to hot, dry summers -- and to a yard you never enter while the sun's up. It can inject a three-dimensional sculpture of light and shadow into a flat, gray winter landscape.

Discover the Benefits

• Larger trees can insulate your home from extreme heat and cold. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "landscaping may be your best long-term investment for reducing heating and cooling costs", and properly sited trees can cut your fuel consumption by 25% to 40%, cooling the air under them by nine to twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit in the summer and insulating house walls from heat-stealing winter winds. Read the DOE's Fact Sheet titled "Landscaping for Energy Efficiency".
  
  
• Trees filter the air and make it healthier for humans to breathe. Not only do they make oxygen, but they also store nutrients that would otherwise be converted to greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. They anchor soil and prevent erosion, which delivers excess nutrients to water ecosystems. Read the Ecological Society of America's 13-page paper titled "Ecosystem Services: Benefits Supplied to Human Societies by Natural Ecosystems".
  
  
• Mature trees can add thousands of dollars to the value of your property and increase its sales appeal, according to several studies cited by the American Nursery and Landscape Association. Read more about "The Value of Plants and Landscaping".

Choose a Style

• In northern locales, you might try a boreal forest, dominated by spruce and fir, with white birch and poplar lending ghostly trunks in winter and fresh young green in summer, patches of evergreen punctuated by light, cheery clearings.
  
  
• The northeastern half of the U.S. and central U.S. were home once to hardwood forests of maple and beech--tall, deeply shaded oases for the sweltering summers and brown, bare trunks to let in the light during gray winters.
  
  
• If you're sitting on sandy or rocky land, consider a pine barren, with open-canopied pitch pines or jack pines above dry, sparse vegetation, home to many birds and butterflies.
  
  
• For a more parklike feel that will thrive in sunny, somewhat dry areas, grow an oak or pine savannah with widely spaced trees rising from a swath of grassland.

Think in Layers

Canopy

There's the canopy, the tallest trees that tower over the other plants and create the ceiling.

Understory

Understory trees and shrubs are suited to grow beneath the canopy trees and survive in the dappled shade they cast. Understory plants can be five feet high or twenty feet high, depending on how close they are to each other, how much light the top trees let through, and how high the canopy is.

Ground

Covering the ground beneath it all are the herbaceous plants of the woodland floor. Early-flowering ephemerals have adapted to take advantage of the greater light under deciduous trees in spring. A few deep shade lovers thrive under the skirts of evergreens. More varied and light-dependent plants spring up in clearings. Sedges, ferns, mosses, and broad-leaf perennials scatter through the woods, each seeking its assigned place, the place to which it has adapted over millennia.

Choose the Plants

Orchestrate the Transition

• If you start from bare lawn, your woodland will develop in stages over time, moving from a young and crowded group of plants to a sparser, shadier area with definite layers. You need to know the design of the mature woodland before you plant anything, but you may also wish to separately design the young woodland, since it will be with you for ten to fifteen years and perhaps longer, depending on the growth rate of the canopy trees you've chosen.
  
  Plant the canopy trees first. They'll likely need to reach a certain height before you can add the shade-tolerant understory. In the meantime, you have several options for plantings between your young trees.
  
  
  • You can mimic the way plant communities change over time by interspersing sun-loving plants between the small trees. Choose annuals or short-lived perennials or shrubs, since as the young trees mature, they'll create more shade.
  
  
  
  • You can also try interspersing young trees with plants that can tolerate a wide range of light conditions and will continue to thrive as they move from sun to dappled shade.
  
  
  
  • In How to Make a Forest Garden, permaculture expert Patrick Whitefield suggests planting a low-maintenance "green manure" crop such as clover or alfalfa between the trees, mowing it twice a year, and leaving the clippings on the ground to mulch the young forest floor.
  
  
• If you start from large trees above lawn, adding mainly understory and groundcover plants, your woodland can achieve a mature look far more quickly without passing through the "young forest" stage. This will save you the time and money of designing two separate gardens, and you can just focus on transforming your plot into that ideal woodland in your mind.

Maintain It

• Pruning
  In the first stage of its life, a woodland will benefit from pruning. Pruning the canopy trees will help them grow tall quicker and will keep the area under them free for the understory plants, which you can then plant sooner.
  
  After the canopy is high enough, it isn't necessary to prune canopy trees unless wind or lightning damages a large limb, branches obstruct passage along the paths, or the canopy grows too thick to allow understory growth. This latter situation can be prevented by choosing canopy trees that only produce dappled shade (such as oak, ash, or birch) rather than those that cut out most of the light (such as maple or spruce) if you want to grow a thick understory layer.
  
  Understory shrubs and trees may be pruned periodically in the first few years for good air circulation and to create pleasing shapes, and fruiting or flowering species usually benefit from pruning every several years throughout their lives to let light into the interior and increase production.
  
  Finally, you can prune off damaged limbs, though these are also important habitat for certain species, so you may decide to leave them if they don't threaten buildings or other plants.
  
  Trees grown in a woodland setting won't require regular pruning. Cris Saunders explains exactly when to prune forest trees in his article "Let It Alone." Saunders writes, "No tree in nature requires pruning for its health."
  
  
• Raking
  There is no raking in a woodland. Let the litter lie, and it will decompose and form humus that builds healthy soil rich in nutrients. There are only a few instances in which you'd want to remove fallen leaves:
  
  
  • Diseased plants whose leaves turn black or develop spots or rust may spread the disease to other plants. Cut off all diseased foliage and dispose of it in the trash. Do not compost it, as composting may not heat the foliage enough to sterilize it, and you risk spreading the disease to other plants even after months or years spent in the compost heap.
    
    
  • Some trees or shrubs might generate thick leaf litter that could smother the plants you've planted below them. Ideally, you'd only underplant a heavily littering tree with plants that can survive the annual blanket, or you wouldn't plant anything but leave a peaceful stretch of woodland floor. If you must plant under a heavily littering tree, remove some of the leaf litter from the plants below it every fall.
  
  
• Fiddling With the Mix
  Colonies of plants soothe the eye and mind and make a woodland feel spacious. They also require less maintenance than a mix of many species; you won't need to wade among them setting artificial boundaries so the more vigorous species don't swamp the less vigorous ones.
  
  Try large single-species colonies (or "drifts") planted to gradually run into each other, with slight mingling at the edges, which will give you variety but keep maintenance low. Or plant a spreading groundcover interspersed with shrubs that are too tall to be swamped. Another design choice is mingling several species that are similarly aggressive.
  
  
• Watering
  Maybe the plants are worth some watering when they're first getting established, perhaps even through their first year. After that, let them alone. Supplementing the water they naturally receive will make them less healthy by encouraging shallow, thirsty roots and growth beyond the plants' capacity to support themselves.
  
  If there's a drought in your area that breaks records, you could relent and soak the woodland thoroughly once every few weeks, just enough that the less drought-tolerant species don't weaken and invite disease. Better yet, plant drought-tolerant species in the first place and avoid having to wonder whether you should water them or not. This is an excellent reason to rely on native plants, which have adapted to the local climate extremes over thousands of years.

• A Stroll Garden
  
  
• A Tea Garden