Your first step in working out a foundation planting is to study your house—its size, style and height. The plants you choose must fit the house, must also suit the growing conditions around it, and the decorative planters if you choose to use them. Here are a few rules that will help.

The most important part of the house is the doorway entrance. Start the planting there. If the house is on the Cape Cod style, or some edition of it, without any part projections other than perhaps the steps—it's a balanced front (architects call it a facade). A balanced facade calls for a balanced planting; that is, the same planting stretches out each side of the entrance.

Start by setting two low rounded plants each side of the door. If there is a step or two, set the plants so that they will just cover the edge of the steps. They will reach in further, of course, as they grow. Select the slower-growing evergreens from the list, Mugho pine in the colder regions, Japanese yew, also extremely hardy, and boxwood in the moderate zones. Avoid the tall, spiry plant.

Some form of a taller plant may be necessary near a very formal door or one that is rather distinctive to draw attention to it, if indeed such a door needs any such introduction. All you need to do is to emphasize the entrance as distinct from any other part of the facade and the more simple the planting the better.

But the balanced front, so typical of the Cape Cod, or some form of the Colonial, is absent from the modern house. Today the entrance is either placed at one end of the house, or somewhat off center, leaving more of the front on one side of the door than the other. One half of the house may be frame and the other brick, or stone veneer; the stone or brick side may be on straight simple lines, the other span-shaped. In some houses, a garage or bedroom may project ten or more feet, making it L-shaped.

There are many interpretations of the ranch house; in some the picture window is enlarged to a point where it occupies a considerable section of the facade. All these variations, of course, need a somewhat different plant arrangement. At the same time you can reduce most of the modern houses to a few simple lines and, except for some specialized structure, work out a formula that has a pretty safe application. Here's the way to approach the problem.

When the entrance door, in a Cape Cod or similar facade, is considerably off center, leaving more building on one side of the door than the other, extend the planting beyond the corner on the short end to give more balance to the facade. If a driveway or other construction detail interferes, plant a tall, upright-growing evergreen against the corner, a climbing rose or a vine on a trellis. Where a section of the house projects, there is no need, as in the Cape Cod style, to balance the planting on either side of the entrance; the front, itself, is not symmetrically balanced.

If the projection is not more than 3 ft. and if the entrance is within the angle, with a step or platform of comparable width, a low plant is set at the edge of the projection and a tall one on the open side of the platform— preferably a plant with a squarish form like Hicks' yew. Should the path approach the step directly, the low plant is now balanced with another low one; thus you have one on either side of the path at the entrance. If the projection exceeds 3 ft. or becomes a wing, the house is given a more L-shaped appearance, usually with the entrance in the angle.