If your house is rather wide or your lot very narrow and there are only a few feet left between the end of the house and the property line, you will not be able to do much more planting to soften the architectural lines. However, when there is more space available on either or both sides of the house, you should extend the foundation planting in order to add "wings" of plant material to the building.

The object of a wing planting is to make the house look lower and wider and to give it the appearance of greater stability. This is the case with ranch style homes. A wing planting can be skillfully placed to act as a screen to obstruct the view of passers-by. This sort of screening is one way of effectively separating the public area from the private area.

It is advisable, whenever possible, to leave some of the house foundation exposed. It is now generally felt that the continuous foundation planting so common around modern homes is a hangover from the old days when foundations were three or more feet in height, and consequently were awkward and ugly to look at.

The usual, and correct, procedure in such cases was to screen the entire foundation with shrubs like spineless yucca plant. You should do the same if your home has an excessively high foundation as we use to see years ago in home design.

Most modern homes, however, have very low foundations and, sometimes, no visible foundation whatever. Furthermore, homes have "grown smaller" on the outside owing to the more efficient use of space on the inside, and it is therefore wise to allow some of the building between the corner and entrance plantings to show through. This creates the illusion of greater size. It is also more pleasing aesthetically in most cases to have the green lawn running right up to the home.