Landscaping Tips For Homeowners

Are you currently planning a landscaping project for your yard? Are you looking for ways to make your home's exterior attractive and to add value to your property? Choosing a new look for your home can be challenging, but also fun and exciting as you come up with new ideas. Before you finalize any landscaping plans, here are some ideas to get you started:

Choose a focal point: Ordinary yards have no focal point, except for the lawn. While a well-kept lawn can be attractive, it doesn't often do a good job of catching the eye. Pick one feature and landscape around that. This could be a beautiful tree in your yard or you could purchase an outdoor fountain to base your landscape design around. Whatever you choose, plant your most interesting vegetation closest to your focal point and more ordinary plants further away. Doing this will help to draw the viewer's eye to the area of your property that you choose. Drawing attention away from various parts of your property can also help distract from less attractive features of your home that you have no control over, such as utility meters.

Use a variety of ground cover: Grass can withstand being walked on, making it an extremely popular ground cover for most yards. However, being so common also has a tendency to make it boring. While you may want to keep grass around high-traffic areas, such as around the base of your focal point, use other low-growing plants in less-trafficked areas. For example, you may choose to plant clover instead of grass in some areas of your lawn. Not only will clover provide a different shade of green, to contrast with any grass you still have, it adds nitrogen to the soil and makes it more fertile. 

Pay attention to future plant height: Some people only pay attention to colors when choosing flowering plants. Unfortunately, planting by color and blossom shape only can lead to some plants getting "lost" in your flowerbeds. Instead of planting flowers of different heights together, try to plant them so that the shorter plants are closer to the front of your property and the taller plants are closer to the house. Planting a wall of tall hollyhocks along your fence line may be beautiful, but it can block the view from the street. If you went through a lot of effort and took a long time to landscape your yard to perfectly match your house and your personality, you probably don't want to accidentally hide your efforts from view.

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