Landscape Planning
Choosing to landscape your property involves preparing for an expensive undertaking. Landscape planning should be your very first step before redoing your property. Buying plants and materials without a plan creates the potential for an expensive, chaotic experience. Landscape planning helps to organize this major undertaking and provide design options to assist with decision making. Let's look at some aspects of landscape planning
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Professional Landscape Planners
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Consider hiring a landscape planner to evaluate your property or provide ideas to help you get started. You certainly don't have to use the services of the professional for creating gardens, installing borders and walls or general planting. Use a landscape professional to help you make choices about landscape features that would best suit your property. They help with garden location and suggest the best plants for the location based on soil type and available sunlight. While this might seem like an expensive outlay, most professionals will provide you with a detailed drawing and a plant and material list during this consultation.
Budget
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Budget affects everything with landscape planning. Plants and materials aren't cheap, so expense must be your primary consideration. If you choose to use a design professional, give her your budget before planning begins. She'll suggest plants that fit within your cost parameters. Remember that you don't have to do every bit of landscaping at one time. Spacing the creation of gardens over a few years helps cut costs. Consider how plants will grow over time and whether individual plantings will require dividing with yearly growth. In addition, you can fill in with more plants each year to cut immediate expenses.
Creating Your Design
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If you like the do-it-yourself concept, grab a sheet of graph paper and sketch out the hardscape elements of your property to scale. Hardscape elements include the house, driveway, walkway, deck, patio, porch or anything that functions as a permanent nonliving design feature of your home. You must landscape around these features, as well as consider some of them as focal points in your landscape. Typical home landscaping design leads directly to the entryway, focusing on the front door as the centerpiece. Backyard landscaping tends to flow outward from the main gathering space, whether it be a pool or gathering space on a patio or deck.
Address any issues, such as noise reduction or privacy issues. If you choose to add a fence, include this in the drawing. Hedges work well to hide ugly air conditioner and heating units, as well as to block portions of the yard for privacy with a natural fence. Consider how you'd like to frame the best features of your yard. Irregular garden shapes soften the sharp edges of wood decks, patios and fences. Also, decide just how much grass you'd like to mow.
Incorporate basic landscape concepts such as continuity, color and texture into your design. Continuity and color refer to the repetition of certain elements, such as plants, rocks or borders, to tie the design together. Texture refers to the use of various plants to create interest in the gardens. Mix evergreens with perennials or choose annuals to add interesting leaf and flower colors. Color and texture should be used in moderation so the design doesn't become too busy and confused.
If you're designing your own landscape, consult with your local garden center for the best choices for trees, shrubs and plants to save both time and money. Choose plants that flower at varying times throughout the growing season for continual color. Annotate your drawing with every bit of information possible so you can visualize the final result. Once you've settled on the fine details, enact your plan to create a beautiful landscape for your home.
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