Nothing in the schedule is deciduous

A boundary planted for screening has one job, and it is easiest to get wrong in the months you most need it done.

At Project Maxpro the schedule runs to 86 plants across seven species and none of them is deciduous. The palms, the Strelitzia, the Agapanthus and the Liriope all hold their leaves through the harmattan. That is not a preference about how the garden looks. Two of the four boundaries are roads, and a screen that thins between December and February fails in the dry season — which is when the dust is worst and everybody is outside.

The decision is made at specification or it is not made at all. Nobody replaces a boundary planting because it goes bare for two months a year. They live with it, and the garden is a little less private every dry season for as long as it exists.

THE SCREEN IS ALSO THE VIEW

There is a second reason to read the schedule rather than the plan. All the flowering in this garden is in the screen: eighteen Strelitzia reginae, eleven Agapanthus and ten bougainvillea, every one of them in the planted edge. The planting that keeps the road out is the same planting that gives the garden its colour.

That is what you get when the boundary is treated as the view instead of as the edge of the view. It also means the two cannot be separated later. Thin the screen and you have taken the colour with it.

The catch is that all of it is a maintained condition rather than a built one. The stepped heights and the colour run hold for as long as somebody keeps the Strelitzia out of the Agapanthus.