Landscape design is an easy way to beautify your home, add curb appeal and increase the value of your home. By landscaping your yard, you can add color and shape to your home’s exterior, and you will enjoy vibrant colors and fragrances. If you plan carefully, your yard can have color during your area’s entire growing season. Plus, gardening is a great workout with instant gratification: a stunning yard.No matter how big or small your yard is, you can add one or more flowering gardens, beds and borders. If you have a small yard and no children who need play space, you might consider turning your entire back yard into a charming English or modern Oriental garden. If your yard is large or you need space for a swing set and other children’s toys, stick to small gardens, beds and borders.
If, like most of us, you’re not a horticulturist, you can visit your local bookstore or library and find an enormous variety of books about landscape design and flower gardening. The Flower Gardener’s Bible by Lewis and Nancy Hill is an excellent book (especially for beginner gardeners) that provides a wealth of information about bulbs, rhizomes, perennials, annuals, herbs and flowering shrubs, as well as landscape design plans for all areas of the yard. It also covers garden pests and maintenance, and it contains a seasonal checklist of garden tasks.
The book’s landscape design section offers plans for a path garden, foundation gardens, a child’s garden, rock gardens, hillside gardens, shade gardens, seashore gardens, a water garden and many more. One of the most valuable parts of this book is the full-color flower directory, which allows you to learn about hundreds of plants and determine which will do well in your yard and zone.
Guidelines for Gardening
There are definitely some guidelines that you should follow when designing your home’s landscape. I’ll discuss some of the key guidelines and tips so you can avoid landscaping pitfalls.
Plan, plan, plan. Many beginning gardeners make the mistake of picking out pretty plants and shrubs, then just starting to dig up the yard without planning. The first thing you should do is sketch out your yard and the area where you plan to plant a garden. You can define this area using landscaping blocks, old bricks, railroad ties or a natural marker, such as a tree.
The next step is to determine your planting zone and the type of sunlight that shines on your garden area. If the area receives eight hours or more of sunlight, then it’s a sunny area. If it receives four hours of sunlight and four hours of shade, then it’s a part sun/part shade area. If it receives fewer than four hours of sunlight, then it’s a part shade to shady area. Make sure you select plants according to the sunlight they will receive. For example, hostas and lily-of-the-valley prefer shady areas and lilies and snapdragons prefer sunny spots.
Be sure to plan so that your plants won’t intrude on walkways and paths or cover your house numbers.
Get creative. No one said a garden path, border or garden itself must have straight lines. Add curves to your gardens and paths to create visual interest. Your garden should reveal a part of your personality. Get inspired and make your garden your own work of art.
Choose a theme. Whether you like the colorful wildness of a traditional English garden or the modern simplicity of an Oriental garden, your plants will look more cohesive if you have a theme. From rock gardens to water gardens, from monochromatic to complementary colors, choose a theme and stick with it.
Plant so that something is always blooming during the growing season. In most zones, different plants bloom at different times of the growing season, and a beautiful garden always has at least a few things blooming at the same time. You want to plant your garden so that it blooms in waves from early spring until the first frost, and some plants will carry over to the next wave. To achieve this, be sure to become familiar with each plant’s bloom time.
Fill in with annuals. In cooler zones, the rule is to plant annuals after Mother’s Day, as they are not frost-tolerant. Annuals bloom throughout the current growing season — from spring to late summer or fall — and then die. They are robust bloomers, and they grow quickly. For this reason, annuals are perfect for a variety of uses in the garden.Plant them in containers and hang them from shepherd’s hooks to add color and life at a higher level in your garden, or plant several large containers of annuals to border your deck or patio. One of the best uses for annuals is to fill in holes in a newly planted perennial garden. In this way, you will eliminate large gaps and have color throughout the growing season. You can find annuals that thrive in shade, such as impatiens, as well as those that prefer sunny areas, like marigolds. Make sure you deadhead your annuals, throughout the growing season to keep them blooming, but allow them to go to seed just before the first frost. Then you can collect the seeds and plant them next spring.
Be wary of invasive plants. Trumpet vines, strawberries, chameleon flower and honeysuckle vine are all beautiful plants. However, they are also very aggressive growers and can become invasive if not controlled properly. Invasive plants are best left out of the garden, but if you can’t resist their beauty, plant them in containers to control them.
Keep your plants neat. Weeding, deadheading and dividing are the chores of the gardener. Weeds can choke your beautiful plants and prevent them from growing to their full potential. Furthermore, allowed to become overgrown, weeds can kill your plants. A couple of landscaping elements can help you control weeds.
Black landscape fabric is the thing to use when you’re in the planning stages of your garden. Cover the area you plan to plant with landscape fabric, and it will prevent weeds and grass from growing in the area until you plant. In fact, you can leave the landscape fabric on the ground and just cut holes in it so you can plant your flowers, and this will prevent weeds in the garden area. Once you’ve planted, cover the area around the plants with mulch. Mulch is available in a range of colors to suit your home and your taste, and it greatly diminishes the amount of weeds you will have dig up. You can also use rock in lieu of mulch to control weeds and add a great look to your garden.
Deadheading is just what it sounds like — removing the dead flower heads from your plants. Many perennials will bloom bigger and longer if you deadhead them. Some rose bushes can rebloom if you remove the dead rosehips. And annuals will bloom denser and longer if you remove the dead flowers. At the end of the growing season, leave the dead heads on your annuals and perennials such as columbine; they will go to seed and you can collect the seeds to plant next year.
Dividing is a task you should do whenever your perennials, bulbs or rhizomes become thick and unruly. Most perennials require dividing every few years. The great thing about dividing is that the plants you dig up to thin out thick areas are ready for planting in another area, or you can give them to friends and neighbors for their gardens. When you plant a garden, you will have an everlasting supply of plants.
Maintain your trees and shrubs. From rose bushes to birch trees, shrubs and trees require pruning and trimming to keep them healthy, full and out of the way of walkways.
Know the work involved in fountains and water gardens. Water gardens and fountains are gorgeous additions to your yard and garden, but it’s important to understand that they require maintenance and cleaning, or you’ll end up with a mating ground for mosquitoes and bugs.
Avoid or remove ugly landscaping elements. Red lava rock, white quartz rock, chicken wire, shoddy trellises and other unattractive elements detract from the beauty of your garden and its flowers. Don’t use them. If any of these things already exists in your garden, get rid of them.
Happy landscaping!
