City beautification is an important part of a community’s aesthetics. Beautiful garden beds in medians, along main thoroughfares, and streets add to the ambiance and sense of place in a city. Attractive municipal landscapes can help educate the city’s residents and provide support for environmental programs, like “protecting and providing resources for pollinators”. Correct landscape municipal garden beds can also be inspirational

At first when I turned onto this street and saw the bright explosion of this colorful red and orange groundcover. I was pleased and appreciated the effort. As I drove down the street though, it was evident that these landscape beds were not sustainable and will eventually be chaotic, likely to stress, and become high maintenance. And the cost was on an attraction park’s instant landscape level, meaning very tightly packed and 2x the cost and labor necessary. What’s wrong?

The groundcover plants, Lantana camera. ‘Bloomify Red’ were planted two 1-gallon plants every foot in the 12” wide bed. The three individual beds measured 750’ in length with a total amount of plants numbering approximately 800+ plants.

The problem is that each of these plants will get to be 11: wide and 10” tall. This instant landscape has double the number of plants it actually needs. To be sustainable, there is only room for 450 - 500 plants.

When assessing plants for your landscape bed, space plants according to their mature width, not the initial size when plants are installed. I’ll be watching this “Bloomify Red” lantana lining this street to see how the flowers do, how many survive, and how they look after a year. 7

Source: Deng, Zhanao, and Sandra Barbour Wilson. ““BloomifyTM Red” and “BloomifyTM Rose”, Two Infertile Lantana Camara Cultivars for Production and Use in Florida.” EDIS, vol. 2017, no. 5, 30 Oct. 2017, edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/EP544, https://doi.org/10.32473/edis-ep544-2017. Accessed April 2025.