I'm Bill Elzey with Showplace Lawns. How to design a new landscape. Well, we go crazy with that because it's like a blank canvas. You can do anything and everything. Some key points to remember as you approach this project; look at your sunlight conditions. Where is full sun, where is part sun, part shade, where is full shade. That's going to determine where grass can be and what type of plants you will use. The other thing that you will want to notice is where a good place is to plant some taller things, some medium plants, and some low plants. Keep that in mind, especially as you work with a bed. You don't want to block everything out and had stuff in the middle that nobody can see. The best thing to do is as you look at your property, come up, draw you a plan, look at it, study it because you will change it, you're going to change it again. But draw something out like this to get an idea of what you've got. Get a nice long, or several long garden hoses to outline areas as you see them on your property so you get a visual as to what it may look like. The other thing that you would consider when you're doing a bed or an area, don't make it it square and ninety degrees, put some character in to it, corners, bends, and things of that nature. Grass is a good thing because it turns carbon dioxide in to oxygen so we have something to breathe. So you want some grass, but you don't need to have a lot of it, and there fore you can fill it in with some other things, thus taking away the problem of keeping the grass growing. I know here in South Central Texas, maintaining lawns is a real challenge at times. This basic design here, we've put a walk way in to a patio, a walk way and a big turn around spot with a bird feeder in the middle, we put some trees, some ground cover, and a bird bath in the corner over there, some grass, two trees and a bed, some ground cover across here, grass again, some more trees. A bed around the corner, a tree, another tree, another bird feeder, and some grass. What I like to use for walkways in a garden situation is decomposed granite because decomposed granites, granite is pervious, which means that the water will still go down through that and disperse to help things around it. It's not like if this was all concrete and water never gets there. So that's a good thing to put in with a border. The border's can be rock, brick, wood, metal edging, and I would prefer those before I would think of anything made of plastic because plastic will deteriorate over time and need to be replaced. It's going to be up to you as to what you want, how much of it you want, what type of plants work in your area to fit the sunlight requirements. Again, mark off with a garden hose to get an idea, draw you up a plan, and work with that before you start. The other thing I might suggest is to break it down in to stages. Do one or two things, then work on one or two other things, and so forth, until you get it all filled in. That also will allow you to see things coming together and help you to make a decision because you will also, again, be changing your mind as you go. These are some ideas that we use when we do, design a new landscape.
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