Landscaping and designing your yard

Over the past number of years I have bought and sold 5 homes that my family has lived in as our permanent residence. I have five children and have had to landscape my yard according to their ages.

What I have learned over the years is that when planning where your main activities are going to be and the type of plants or trees that you will have nearby, must be done by thinking about how you will utilize this area 5 years down the road. 

For people with young families this means designing for the future. A young child of 2 does not require the same area as a child of 6 or 12. Unique garden decorations play a very big role when decorating your yard.

• patio furniture for outdoor dining areas must fit into this plan

You may be thinking that your won't be there in five years, although that maybe true you still have to think of your resale factor. If your yard is designed for a 5 year old and the people that are viewing your home do not have children or only have teenagers this could be a hard sell. Landscaping for younger children should be done as an add-on or temporary addition so that it can be easily removed as they grow older.

When purchasing a new home, a real-estate agent will always tell you that you should spend up to 10% of the value of your home on landscaping design. Where this may have been true 20 years ago when lots where 100 feet wide and 120 to 150 feet deep this is not true today. Houses are bigger and lots are smaller, because of this trend landscape design requires a lot more thought in the planning stage.

• Many companies today offer landscape design software at a very reasonable price. I found one here: Yardiac SILVER Landscape Package - Medium  
• Here is how it works! Sign up for the consultation and design by ordering below Send the completed questionnaire and pictures back to Yardiac. They will assign your project to a Landscape Designer and develop a custom plan for you to Do the work yourself or hire a contractor. On average, designs are completed and returned within two-three weeks.

Do it yourself with this landscape design software. 

How to Start:

Always, always right down your ideas, no matter how elaborate they are. You then go and talk the people at your local garden center. Most if not all of the larger nurseries have a landscape section with qualified people working there that can tell you how to cut corners and save a few bucks.

Walk around inside your home and look at your wall colors, style of furniture and the architecture of entryways. What you are doing is looking for a common theme that blends with how your home looks from the outside.

Now go to the biggest window that overlooks your backyard and try to visualize how you would like this to look. You want to view this area through a window, like you are viewing art or a landscape painting. As you where walking through your home you got a sense of what style you like and now you want this style to be projected outdoors so that your decorating theme extends to the outdoors as a smooth transition. You would repeat this for the front yard by looking out your front picture window. The difference here is you need to look at your neighbor's home in front of you so that your front yard landscaping also compliments your surroundings.

Low maintenance landscaping does not mean artificial turf and rocks

The less time we spend on keeping up our landscaping means more time to relax and enjoy the day. When landscaping low maintenance yards the biggest hurdle will be the design. Picking trees and shrubs is the easier part. If you don’t want to rake leaves then don't plant deciduous trees! Low maintenance landscaping means you will be putting more work into the construction phase rather than the upkeep phase. Use landscape fabric over the ground and around plants with a heavy layer of ground cover like bark mulch or lava rock. This will keep the weeds down.

Trees and Shrubs

Picking trees, shrubs and plants should be down by color and height based on the height and color of your home. Not all plants are one shade of green so you need to use textures and the color of flowers and blossoms at different times of the year.

If you live in an area of North America where the seasons change you are blessed because you can plant flowers that bloom according to the season. The other thing you need to be conscious of is the height that they will grow. Three story homes need very tall growing trees, but keep a close eye on how wide they grow.

Ranchers or a one level home should have trees that grow only slightly bigger than the tallest structure. You don't want towering trees overhead in case of a severe windstorm. If you live in a condo with a very small grass area and still want a shrub or two you can use outdoor bonsai trees to landscape this area. For hillsides and slopes, junipers and decorative grasses will stop any erosion and keep the weeds out.

The shape of your trees shrubs need to compliment each in size, color and texture of the leaves and even the bark.

If you have already have large trees on your lot, near your roof line consider trimming them back, pine needles and leaves will clog your gutters.

Walkways and concrete patios

I made this mistake early on when buying a new home. I used exposed aggregate for a patio floor. Big mistake! It looks really nice but is very hard to clean, it's slippery when wet and is uncomfortable on bare feet. If you were to ever slip on it, it really leaves a mark. Exposed aggregate is fine for retaining walls and can really work well for slopes. Use a nice smooth finish for walks and patio's, you can now add color and textures to this type of finish at a very low cost. Contact your local concrete company to get more information. When planting near your edging always plant a foot back from the edge, it will be easier for clean up and maintenance.

Curves or straight lines

Curved edging has a better look when defining borders and edges. This can be done with wood 1X4's, plastic commercial edging or concrete curbing that you can lock together. Using wood or plastic is the cheapest, but for minimum upkeep or low maintenance use concrete or blocks. Very few homes have round corners so it is best to use curves to compliment the angles of you home.

Be aware of size here, if you are installing a curved edge around a shed the area should be in contrast to the size of the building structure so that it appears to be natural. Take the front yard area for instance. When digging out the area for a garden around the front entryway if you had a small home and made the garden area very large with tall trees it could make the front entrance look even smaller. Keep the lines projecting from the front to scale with your home and then when you reach the curve by the corner of the home you can enlarge this area to give your front more depth or seem larger than it is.

Adding special landscape features

Water fountains, fishponds, garden statues and other garden ornaments add to the overall effect of your landscaping theme. Statues and ornaments are by nature low maintenance but water features can really be labor intense if not set up properly. If you have a very wet area in your yard it might be advisable to add a water feature here as long as it's not a fishpond.

With fishponds you have to be careful with surface run off and contaminants. If you would like information about site selection  and where to build a water feature click here. There also mountains of books on how to install your own water feature, Amazon.com is a good place to start looking online. These are projects that need to be planned in at the beginning but not necessarily done right away.

Remember to try and work with what you have and how the surrounding area looks. By not fighting with nature your job will go much smoother. For instance a low spot that you think needs have fill trucked in, is an ideal spot for a deck to go over a garden pond or to have a bridge extended over it. If you can afford it hiring a landscape architect just to draw up your design would be money well spent. You can then do the work yourself over time.

Other resources that may be of help:

• Tips for indoor landscaping.

The University of Florida has good information on  Basic Principles of Landscape Design

This site is a pretty good place to search for up coming events that may be happening in your state. http://www.apld.com/news/