Landscaping has often been likened to the painting of a picture. Your art-work teacher has doubtless told you that a good picture should have a point of chief interest, and the rest of the points simply go to make more beautiful the central idea, or to form a fine setting for it. So in landscaping there must be in the gardener’s mind a picture of what he desires the whole to be when he completes his landscaping project.

Should you include lots of bare open lawn in your landscaping theme? A large extent of open lusious green lawn space is always beautiful. It is restful.

This type of open landscaping adds a feeling of space to even small grounds. If you cover your lawn space with many trees, with little flower beds here and there, the general effect is choppy and fussy. A bit like an over-dressed person. Not the most visual appealing result from your landscaping efforts.

When front yard landscaping, a single tree or a small group is not a bad arrangement on the lawn. Do not centre the tree or trees. Let them drop a bit into the background. Make a pleasing side feature of them. In choosing trees for your landscaping project, keep in mind a number of things. You should not choose an overpowering tree. The tree should have a good shape, with something interesting about its bark, leaves, flowers or fruit.

For the beauty of landscaping, the catalpa is quite lovely by itself. Its leaves are broad, its flowers attractive, the seed pods which cling to the tree until way into the winter, add a bit of picturesqueness. The bright berries of the ash, the brilliant foliage of the sugar maple, the blossoms of the tulip tree, the bark of the white birch, and the leaves of the copper beech all these are beauty points to consider when planning your overall landscaping arrangement.

Front Yard landscaping may follow along very formal lines or along informal lines. The first would have straight paths, straight rows in stiff beds, everything, as the name tells, perfectly formal. The other method is, of course, the exact opposite. You should consider the advantages and danger points in each.

In conclusion, plan for open lawn spaces in your overall front yard landscaping design and keep a visually appealing tree to blend in the background. Think balance and you will come up with a beautiful landscaping design for your yard.

I found a great article about front  yard landscaping that I wanted to share.

The first paragraph of the Landscaping Your Front Yard article starts out:

Each home and its landscape should be a reflection of the people who live there. The front yard is the visitor’s first impression of the home and its inhabitants. When first seen, it should be inviting and direct the guest easily to the front door. The purpose of this publication is not to be a formula for the development of the front yard, but rather a guideline to planning and making choices, along with an explanation of the basic principles involved in designing a landscape. Drawings are included to illustrate concepts but are not to be interpreted as exact designs to be copied.

Read the rest of the Front Yard Landscaping Article.  I think it will help.

As always if you are planning on doing your own landscaping, I have some recomendations that you might want to consider located on the top right hand corner of this website.

Happy landscaping!

There are a number of ways to enhance your home’s appearance, from smaller tasks such as weeding and mowing the lawn, to larger projects such as an exterior remodeling project.

It’s well known that potential buyers make up their minds in the first few minutes of seeing a home. How your home presents itself from the road can actually make or break the sale. You can make a world of difference in how your home is perceived by adding a boxwood hedge, painting the front door, or simply fertilizing and weeding the lawn.

It helps to write down a complete inventory of what is wrong with your home’s appearance, then make a list of ways in which you can fix those problems. It could be as simple as adding a flower bed or planting a tree. If your home lacks visual depth, installing a portico over your front door could be the solution. A walkway lined with bright flowers is always helpful. A good, old-fashioned paint job can give the home a face-lift, as well as new siding. If the roof looks dull, replacing the shingles can breathe new life into the house. View all repairs and improvements with the idea that you’ll make back your money three, five, or even ten times over with these tips.

The most important thing to keep in mind when preparing your house is to be objective. Look at your house and yard as if you were a buyer, and determine curb appeal from that perspective. You may notice things you’ve spent years overlooking. By spending a little time fixing up your house, you could potentially add thousands to the selling price.

Some tips that can be extremely useful in landscaping one’s front yard are:

• The yard should contain various plantations in the form of plants and trees. The trees and plants have a beauty of their own and give the yard a natural look and feel.
• The porch is also an important part of the front yard. The designing of that particular part of the yard should be done with great care.  The materials used on the porch should also be similar to the rest of the house and should not disturb the natural ambience.
• The maintenance of the sidewalk of the yard is also another important aspect as it enables the incoming and out going people to notice the beauty of the house in full effect.

Front Yard Gardens:

Front yard gardening is usually done to highlight the best features of your home and its front. Apart form keeping in mind how you want your front yard garden to look, there are also other considerations that you must go through. What most people fail to remember in their enthusiasm for beautifying their front yards is that the long-term effects have to be kept in mind before planting the shrubs and trees.

First of all you have to make sure that the plants you plan to plant have a good chance of survival. So, checking the amount of shade or sunlight, the kind of soil etc has to be checked before hand. You also have to be careful about the kind of plants you choose to plant near the foundation of the house. Choose plants whose roots are not likely to endanger the foundation of the house when fully mature. 

If you have a wide shadow of your home falling on your front yard, it is advised to plant small shrubs farther away form the house so as not to deprive them of sunlight and to protect them from the heat which would be reflected off the wall.

As a real estate broker and landscape enthusiast, I see all kinds of yards and meet all types of people.  I know some successful landscape business owners and I have met some that just don’t get it. 

Sometimes when I have clients looking at properties, I cringe when we arrive and the first thing we see is a lack of any landscape design or any landscaping at all.

Have you been scouring the Internet for landscape ideas?  If you allow it to happen all the terms and choices can be overwhelming.  As I have been writing blog posts about front yard landscape ideas, I have realized that choosing the best design for you can be daunting if you don’t simplify your choices.

Ever hear of the acronym KISS?  It means Keep it simple stupid.  I try to keep things simple in all that I do.  Landscaping is no different.  Trying to visualize what the end product will be without examples is impossible for me.  I need a guideline and examples.  Most people are more successful if they have examples or steps to follow.

For this reason I tell my clients and those starting a landscape business, that Landscape 4 home is a minimal investment for what you receive.

Christina Peterson is a professional landscaper and has created this fantastic landscape design product.

Here is a quote and guarantee from Christina: “You really don’t even have to think about it, though, because I’ll guarantee you’ll start creating landscape designs that are environmentally friendly, low maintenance and that will give you years of enjoyment….or you won’t owe me a dime”

Do yourself a favor and check it out.

Landscape Ideas For Your Home

Taking a drive around town will reveal yards that look the same. Sure some may have beautifully manicured lawns and others may not but the overall look is the same, green grass, trees and flowers. If you’re longing to make your yard stand out from the acres of sameness adding some decorative rocks and stones to your landscape design will do the trick.

The addition of landscaping rocks will give your yard a style and character that most homeowners would love to have but don’t know where to start. The first step to adding some personality to your landscaping is to remove some of the grass. If you aren’t using your front lawn there’s no point in maintaining it and this will make your landscape ideas unique.

Use a shovel or if you have access to one, use a tiller to break up the ground. Pull the rocks out of your way –these are not the kind of rocks we’ll be using for this landscaping project

While you’re digging, decide whether or not you have the proper drainage for your plants and flowers, if not, now would be a good time to add the appropriate irrigation system.

One addition that you can add to your front yard landscaping is to add a walkway. Having your guests use the driveway or worse, the grass, to get to your door is not ideal landscape design so think about adding a walkway. This addition will keep guests from tracking in dirt and other debris in to your home too.

One popular effect for a stone walkway is to stagger rocks all along the walk to your door. Make certain that when you do the final install your rocks are secure and they don’t move when they are walked on. To keep the rocks in place remove four to five inches of soil beneath each rock that you lay. Add a thin layer of gravel beneath the stone. This will keep your rocks and stones in place to ensure safety and stability.

When planning the walkway try to add interest by adding curves to your landscaping design. This will give your work a more distinctive yet informal look. Add smaller trees and shrubs top provide structure for your new walkway. And add some color with some easy to care for perennials. Perennials work well with a rock landscape because they are easy to care for yet they add beauty and color to the project.

Once the main plantings are in, you can start to add some smaller greens and flowers. You can add some greens in between the rocks in your walkway to fill in the gaps. Some people suggest that instead of using mulch to maintain the manicured look use river rock between the flowers. Both would work well it’s just a matter of taste and budget.

Now for the finishing touch –add some climbing vines that will wrap up and around your railing and front porch. Hanging plants can be hung from the roof of you porch or you can create a trellis for the vines and the planters. This will give it the finished look of a Tuscan garden. Decorative rocks are the final touch for this easy to do project and you’ll have a front yard that neighbors will envy for years.

For additional ideas for your landscape design, check out Landscape 4 Home.

Improve the value of your home with great landscape ideas

If you own a home, then sooner or later you are going to be ready to sell that home. Maybe you’ve already sold a home or two. People tend to move more often than our parents did.

There are a lot of things that go into getting the best possible price for your home, but the very first thing your home needs is curb appeal. When a prospective buyer, or a realtor for that matter, pulls up in front of your home, they immediately form an opinion about your house. Fair or not, that’s what people do. You can have the most beautiful home in the city, but if prospective buyers don’t get a super positive feeling about your house the minute they lay eyes on it, they are going to enter and view the rest of your house with a negative impression.

Fixing that problem is easy enough to do.

When people pull up in front of your house there are two things they see. A house, and the landscaping in front of that house. If the landscaping is unattractive, the house will appear to be unattractive. Landscaping for curb appeal does not cost a lot of money, it’s simply a matter of making sure the landscaping is neat, with well defined edges, and colorful. But when landscaping for curb appeal, the most important thing you need to do is to raise the beds with topsoil. Of course you have to do this before you plant.

Plants do much better in raised beds, and the plants in the beds really stand out. In order to raise the beds around your house you do not have to buy expensive stones and build retaining walls. Just establish the outline of the planting beds, cut an edge into the soil with a spade, and fill the planting beds with approximately ten inches of good rich topsoil. You’d be amazed at how much you can raise a planting bed without any type of retention.

Here are two more things you don’t need:

Plastic edging. It’s expensive, a lot of work to install, and it never stays in place. You can cut an edge with a spade and your landscape will actually look better. Then you can make the bed a little larger any time you need to.

The other thing you definitely do not need is weed control fabric. The stuff just doesn’t work. The weeds grow right on top of the fabric, then root through the fabric making it even harder to keep your beds weed free. You’ll find a really good article on weed control on my website.

When landscaping for curb appeal, plant placement and selection is very important. In a corner bed you need a centerpiece. I like Canadian Hemlock because they are evergreen and provide an excellent background for more colorful plants. In front of the Hemlock you can use a bright colored evergreen like Gold Thread Cypress, but don’t use too many. Usually three is all you want. Around the backside of the same bed you can use a darker evergreen like Taxus or even a flowering shrub that you keep trimmed down low like Weigela. Lots of colors are fine, but don’t stagger the colored plants in your landscape, use them in groupings, and be careful not to use too many in any one grouping. When you use more than three of any colored plant they lose their effectiveness. You are adding them for contrast, and when used sparingly they look much better.

Front Yard Landscaping Ideas For Your Home offers a lot of good landscape ideas.

In front of a house I like to use an arc of medium height plants like Blue Girl Holly, then put a couple of taller plants behind the arc. When landscaping for curb appeal you want the landscape to stair step toward the house. In other words, the lawn is the bottom step, the raised bed is step two, low growing plants step three and so on.

If you are re-landscaping an older home you probably should start with a sledge hammer before you do anything else and bust out the sidewalk to the front door. Some builders put in the ugliest sidewalks in the world, and they usually are hard to maneuver as you walk toward the front door. Once you have the old sidewalk removed, let your imagination run wild. Remember, you are landscaping for curb appeal, and there is no better way to establish ultimate curb appeal than with a beautiful curved walk that gently winds its way to the front door. Once again, there are photos of such sidewalks on my website, and you’ll see what wonderful landscaping opportunities they present.

The last step in landscaping for curb appeal is to create an interesting shaped raised bed in the front yard. Fill this bed with spring flowering bulbs, and annual flowers for the summer. If your house is going to be on the market in the fall, add some chrysanthemums for a burst of fall color.

So what’s the best benefit of landscaping for curb appeal? You’ll gain great experience so you can make sure your new home is landscaped just the way you want it!

Landscape Ideas to Enhance The Value of Your Home

For homeowners around the world, a big part of owning a home is landscaping the yard. Front yard landscaping or backyard landscaping, the work must be done. While the front yard is important because it’s more visible to neighbors and others who drive by, the backyard is no less important. The backyard is where families and friends gather for barbeques and birthday parties and where some families place their swimming pools. Most backyards are landscaped with careful thought and preparation. Special consideration is put into the positioning of every blade of grass, each decorative stone and all of the species of flowers that beautify a backyard.

Flowers, stones and grass are just some of the ways to landscape a backyard. Large shade trees, waterfalls and herbal gardens are some other ways. The theme of your landscape will depend on your hobbies, interests and goals for your backyard. Backyard landscaping can be a lot of fun, especially when you make it personal. Landscape your yard to reflect your personality and your homes personality. If you and your family like to entertain, add a bar to your back patio. Clean up the barbeque grill and don’t forget the citronella candles to keep the bugs away. Maybe you’ll want to build a croquet course, mini golf course, or put in a sand lot for some sand volleyball. Whatever your preference, make backyard landscaping fun for the whole family.

Keep your family in mind too, when it comes time to maintain the backyard landscaping. Large yards will require a lot more maintenance and grooming. Taking care of the yard can be a nice family activity. You can mow the lawn, pull the weeds and get the kids involved in watering the plants. If you have a fruit tree in your backyard, you’ll probably be spending some time picking up the fallen apples or cherries. And of course, you’ll also need to reserve time to tend to your herbal garden. It can be surprisingly rewarding to grow your own herbs and use them in special recipes that you cook when you’re entertaining friends and neighbors.

If you are the type who would rather keep your backyard to yourself, then maybe you don’t need to worry about the huge, green lawn. Perhaps you’d rather have a quaint yard with basic backyard landscaping. You can put in some grass, strategically place some shade trees and plant some of your favorite flowers. You may want to include some bigger bushes, if space allows as they will add some gorgeous green to your colorful backyard. This type of backyard may require the same maintenance as a large backyard, but not nearly the time commitment. No matter what your personality says about your backyard landscaping, one thing’s for sure—homeowners everywhere will tell you to create your backyard just the way you want to.

Check out Front Yard Landscaping For Your Home

If you have been thinking about how you would like to cut your home energy costs, you might want to take a second look at your home landscaping. This is an area you may not have even thought of.

Did you know energy-efficient home landscaping can reduce your household’s energy consumption for heating and cooling by as much as 25 percent.!That’s staggering, isn’t it? Proper placement of trees, shrubs, vines, grasses, and hedges lets you modify the microclimate around your home to maximize shade during the summer and reduce wind chill during the winter.

Energy-efficient home landscaping is one of the best investments you can make, because aside from its potential to increase the resale value of your property, it can generate enough savings to return your initial investment in less than eight years. It is not surprising then that more homeowners than ever are implementing energy-conserving home landscaping ideas on their property.

So where can we begin with this exciting new landscaping adventure? I hope the following information will be of help to you. Develop a Home Landscaping Plan for Energy Efficiency There are countless home landscaping strategies for energy conservation, but not all of them may be appropriate for your property and climate zone.

 Before you plant those evergreens in your backyard, make an assessment of the comfort and energy shortcomings of your current home landscaping. Things like the property’s microclimate, house location, and the presence of surrounding structures will influence your energy-efficient home landscaping plan. Microclimate is the climate immediately surrounding your home, and along with the regional climate, it helps determine which plants and trees will thrive and provide the best energy-saving benefit to your home landscaping.

Your home’s location affects your dwelling’s exposure to the sun, wind, and water, consequently shaping your home landscaping needs. Nearby buildings, walls, trees, and bodies of water can produce significant climatic effects that would impact your home landscaping strategies. A thorough analysis of your property’s features enables you to devise an energy-efficient home landscaping scheme that addresses your needs and goals.

Landscape to Maximize Shade Properly planned home landscaping can reduce your air-conditioning costs in the summer by providing shade from the hot morning and afternoon sun. Deciduous trees (trees that shed their leaves in winter) provide shade in the summer when its leaves are in full bloom and warm the home in winter by letting low-angle winter sun filter through its bare branches.

Home landscaping that maximizes shade can reduce temperature inside the home by as much as 8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Would you think of shading your air-conditioner through home landscaping because that increases the unit’s efficiency. In addition, shading the ground and pavement with trees, shrubs, and groundcover plants reduces surrounding air temperatures.

Other heat-reducing home landscaping ideas include building a trellis for climbing vines to shade a patio and planting a row of shrubs to shade a driveway. Landscaspe for Wind Protection Home landscaping to divert the flow of cold winds helps cut down your home heating costs in the winter.

Trees, shrubs, bushes, walls, and fences make effective windbreaks for winter-protected home landscaping. You can achieve adequate wind protection through home landscaping by planting evergreen trees and shrubs along the north and northwest areas of your property. Windbreaks can decrease wind speed for a distance as much as 30 times its height, although maximum wind protection occurs at a distance of two to five times the mature height of windbreaks.

For optimal wind protection, make sure that the foliage density on the windward side of your property is 60 percent. A well-designed home landscaping provides energy savings year-round. Enjoy the warmth of the winter sun by not planting evergreens too close to the south side of your home.

Shrubs, bushes and vines planted close to your house create dead air spaces that insulate your home in both winter and summer. I hope this article has been of help to you in creating landscaping for energy conservation. Reducing my household energy consumption by a possible 25% has motivated me to start looking around my yard.

The Foundation For Your Landscape Ideas

Whether you plan on “borrowing ideas” or plan on creating your own landscaping design, you should have at the very least a basic understanding of the principles of landscape design.

This doesn’t mean that you have to apply every principle to every part of your plan. But just having an understanding of these principles will help you generate ideas and increase your creativity.

Great landscaping lies in the eyes of the its creator. So, while the principles of landscape design are great guidelines to follow, don’t feel like they’re the “have to rules” of landscaping. Abstract and creativity are allowed.

Unity should be one of your main goals in your design. It may be better understood and applied as consistency and repetition. Repetition creates unity by repeating alike elements like plants, plant groups, or decor throughout the landscape. Consistency creates unity in the sense that some or all of the different elements of the landscape fit together to create a whole.

Unity can be achieved by the consistency of character of elements in the design. By character, I mean the height, size, texture, color schemes, etc. of different elements.

A good example would be in the use of accent boulders. If you’ve ever seen a landscape design that had one large white round boulder here and another large red square granite boulder there and so on, then you’ve seen that unity wasn’t created by this specific element.

This is just one example but the principle applies to all other elements such as groups of plants and materials.

A simple way to create unity in your landscape is by creating themes. And one of the simplest ways to create themes is by using a little garden decor or garden statues. Creating a theme garden is easier when it’s related to something you’re interested in or have a passion for.

If you’re into butterflies for instance, you could create a theme using plants that attract butterflies as well as using statues, ornaments, and other decor that are related to butterflies.

Unity should be expressed through at least one element in your landscape and preferably more. Using elements to express a main idea through consistent style and a specific theme is what creates harmony.

Simplicity is actually one of the principles in design and art. It’s one of the best guidelines you can follow as a beginner or do it yourselfer. Just keep things simple to begin with. You can do more later.

Simplicity in planting, for instance, would be to pick two or three colors and repeat them throughout the garden or landscape. Keeping decor to a minimum and within a specific theme as well as keeping hardscapes such as boulders consistent is also practicing simplicity.

Balance in design is just as the word implies. Equality. There are basically two types of balance in landscape design. Symmetrical and Asymmetrical.

Symmetrical balance is where there are more or less equally spaced matching elements of the garden design. With a garden equally divided, both sides could share the same shape, form, plant height, plant groupings, colors, bed shapes, theme, etc.

You may remember creating something like this when you were a kid in art class at school. Where you take a piece of paper, splash paint on it, fold it in half, unfold it, and then it magically creates an interesting symmetrical design. So symmetrical balance or design is somewhat of a mirror image or reflection.

Asymmetrical balance on the other hand is one of the principles of landscape design that’s a little more complex. While textures, forms, colors, etc. may remain constant to create some unity, shapes and hardscapes may be more random. This form of balance often has separate or different themes with each having an equal but different type of attraction.

A good example of this would be where bed shapes or paths differ on both sides of the dividing line. One side could be curvy with a sense of flow while the other side is straight, direct, and hard.

This can also create a neat contrast. Flowing lines are pleasing to the eye but the bold contrast of a curve with a straight line can be very interesting.

Asymmetrical balance isn’t necessarily limited to just the shape of your garden.

An example might be where one side of the garden is mostly large shade trees while the other side is predominately a lower growing flower garden or even a mix of both examples. This is only limited to your imagination.

Contrast and harmony can also be achieved using plants. Fine foliage verses coarser foliage, round leaves verses spiked leaves as well as color compliments and contrasts.

Plant height, color, and texture may be varied from one area to the next but each area should stay consistent within its own theme.

You’ll hear me talk about “themes” a lot. Many successful do it yourself designs follow a basic theme to achieve most of the principles of landscape design described on this page. The proper use of plants and garden decor or a mix of both is a simple way to achieve themes.

Color adds the dimension of real life and interest to the landscape. Bright colors like reds, yellows and oranges seem to advance toward you and can actually make an object seem closer to you. Cool colors like greens, blues, and pastels seem to move away from you and can make an object seem farther from you.

Grays, blacks, and whites are considered neutral colors and are best used in the background with bright colors in the foreground. However, to increase depth in a landscape, you can use dark and coarse textured plants in the foreground and use fine textured and light colored plants in the background.

Colors can also be used to direct your attention to a specific area of the garden. A bright display among cooler colors would naturally catch the eye.

Natural transition can be applied to avoid radical or abrupt changes in your landscape design. Transition is basically gradual change. It can best be illustrated in terms of plant height or color but can also be applied to all elements in the landscape including but not limited to textures, foliage shape or size, and the size and shape of different elements.

In other words transition can be achieved by the gradual, ascending or descending, arrangement of different elements with varying textures, forms, colors, or sizes.

An example of a good transition would be a stair step effect from large trees to medium trees to shrubs to bedding plants. This example is where a little knowledge of proper plant selection would come in handy.

Transition is one of the principles of landscape design that can be used to “create illusions” in the landscape. For example a transition from taller to shorter plants can give a sense of depth and distance (like in a painting), making the garden seem larger than it really is. A transition from shorter to taller plants could be used to frame a focal point to make it stand out and seem closer than it really is.

Line is of the more structural principles of landscape design. It can mostly be related to the way beds, walkways, and entryways move and flow.

Straight lines are forceful and direct while curvy lines have a more natural, gentle, flowing effect.

Proportion simply refers to the size of elements in relation to each other. Of all the principles of landscape design, this one is quite obvious but still requires a little thought and planning. Most of the elements in landscape design can be intentionally planned to meet the proper proportions.

For instance if you are creating a small courtyard garden, an enormous seven foot garden statue placed in the center would be way out of proportion and a little tacky to say the least. Or a small four foot waterfall and pond placed in the center of a large open yard would get lost in the expanse.

Don’t misunderstand this to mean that if you have a large yard you can’t have smaller features or garden decor. Proportion is relative and elements can be scaled to fit by creating different rooms in the garden. The goal is to create a pleasing relationship among the three dimensions of length, breadth, and depth or height.

A small water feature can be proportionate if placed in a corner or on the edge of a large area and becomes a focal point of the larger area while creating its own distinct atmosphere. An entire room, sitting area, or theme can be created around it. Other rooms and themes can be created as well. See small gardens for ideas on creating rooms and creating illusions.

Also, special consideration and study should be given to proper plant selection to avoid using plants that are out of proportion.

Repetition is directly related to unity. Its good to have a variety of elements and forms in the garden but repeating these elements gives variety expression.

Unity is achieved by repeating objects or elements that are alike. Too many unrelated objects can make the garden look cluttered and unplanned.

There’s a fine line here. It’s possible that too much of one element can make a garden or landscape feel uninteresting, boring and monotonous.

However, unity can still be created by using several different elements repeatedly. This in turn keeps the garden interesting.

Help with your front yard landscape design or back yard landscape design!  Check it out!