Designing Foundation Plantings for a Picture Perfect Yard

This time we are looking at foundation plantings as the next area in designing a picture perfect yard. Foundation plantings are a vital part of good home landscape design and are undoubtedly one of the easiest and most satisfying landscaping elements in your yard. They can be used as backdrops, to define garden beds, and to simply add seasonal interest. Foundation plantings are another way to add appeal to your home by using them to soften, enhance or even hide certain features of your house.

Foundation plantings are often green shrubs intermixed with flowers. Shrubs have many uses within the landscape with foundation plantings being one; others are privacy hedges, and specimen plants. Evergreens can be broad leafed, or have needle-like foliage and can be large or small but whatever kind or shape they are, they are unsurpassed for tying the house to the ground and are desirable in the landscape because they stay green throughout the entire year as they don’t lose their leaves in the winter like deciduous shrubs do.

Designing your planting on paper ahead of time can save time and prevent costly mistakes. There are many ways to plan a landscape and designs can vary from formal gardens, to a naturalistic look, to carefully placed accent plants but one must always give special consideration to beds designed with small trees and flowering shrubs because these plants can get quite large. Plantings may be selected to shade the foundation edge, especially on the southwest corner of the structure and choosing drought-tolerant plantings that will require less irrigation will mean less chance for irrigation water to create a moisture problem in the house. Corners are one of the most important areas of the "foundation" planting. Houses appear awkward and bare without plantings at the corners since they define the outline of a house. Often this definition is created by plants, such as cone-shaped conifers acting like bookends. I prefer using shrubs with different heights and a mixture of foliar colors and forms because it is more appealing to the eye.

The most common mistake in designing foundation plantings is they are usually planted too close to the house because the beds are too small. They should be spaced away from the foundation and properly spaced apart to accommodate them at size of maturity. Typically, you are looking to establish these evergreens space appropriately spaced along the length of the foundation and around corners, approximately five feet out from the house. They not only need space but love good mulch made from well aged bark, peat moss and or pine straw which are all excellent mulches for all conifers.

One problem that people who live in northern climates have is foundation plantings are often injured by snow and ice falling from the roof onto their branches. Injury may be prevented by wrapping cloth or burlap tightly around evergreens to hold branches together. On the other hand avoid planting during the hot, dry months of summer; fall is a much better time to plant in order to ensure good plant health.

Foundation plantings are here to stay. You may want to get a garden designer to work with you on a design that suits both your lifestyle and personal preferences but the work can be done by you with some sweat and effort. It is said landscaping is good for your health and one of the most cost effective tools for improving and sustaining one’s quality of life, whether in the city, the suburbs, or the country.

Designing Foundation Planting “by the yard”

Entryway Landscaping Designs with pizzazz

The whole idea of Entryway Landscaping is to give the front of your house more pizzazz or presence and to make a connection between the outside and the inside. The front entry door and the spaces connected to it play an important role in setting the stage for the success of the entire house. It begins to establish your home’s personality and suggests how the rest of the house should be.

In landscaping for front door entrances, you are trying to achieve at least three objectives. For instance, you want to:
• Draw the viewer's eye from the street to the front door entrance
• Create an environment that says welcome
• Match the entryway planting to your home’s style and your personal taste

1. One challenge in landscaping for front entryways is that you want the design to blend in reasonably well with the overall landscape design, while still standing out enough to provide a focal point. In landscape design terminology, "focal points" force the viewer’s perspective to a central point. One way to focus attention on the front entryway is to provide an attractive Stone path leading up to it. Stones come in various shades of gray which may have tints of blue, green, tan, brown, rust, and plum mixed with the gray. You can and maybe should individually select the stones to insure quality and the desired color range.

2. As these paths lead to your front door, it is important that they are not only beautiful, but that the entrance to your home finishes their grand plan on arrival. Painting your entry door will help do that and should bring the finishes of the house together. Consideration for the brick, siding, soffit, facia and roof colours should all play a role in choosing the best colour. The owners of the house should be welcomed into their home through a space designed to greet them, to acknowledge them, and to recognize them as the reason it exists. It should make your house more visually appealing and say welcome.

3. Of course, what landscaping you install on the way to your front entryway will depend, in part, on what you have to work with. For instance, if your front entryway is at the top of a slope you may wish to use a ground cover instead of grass, to minimize maintenance. To give you another example, if you have a large open porch for your front entryway, you may wish to make liberal use of containers of flowers on the porch steps. A popular way is to line the sides of the walk way with flowers or small shrubs like boxwood. Gardening is a most important facet of your landscaping design because plants and flowers bring an enhanced and pleasing look to any area.

Numerous entryway landscaping designs and styles have been applied by people and countless other ideas exist in the minds of homeowners that would give an impressive shape and feel to their front yards. Choosing a front entry design which demonstrates the homeowner’s style will make this space in the front yard both usable and enjoyable. When you combine the landscaping (plant life) and hardscaping (walkways, steps, the porch) to create this area of transition and it's done right, the result is amazing.

Entryway Landscaping “by the yard”

The Front Yard Landscape

Although a home with a few trees and a nice green lawn in front looks fine, there’s a lot to be said for a house that has an attractive front yard landscape design. Curb appeal is something many homeowners only consider when trying to sell their home, it should however, be on the mind of every homeowner who cares about keeping their biggest asset in top condition.

Curb appeal is quite simply the attractiveness your home has to viewers from the street and re-landscaping your front yard is a great way to give a new impressive look to your home. Front yard landscaping can be the most tried form of landscaping because everyone tends to focus primarily on the look of a house’s front yard. Sometime however this can be a problem as we can get caught trying to do things others have done but they may not be the right thing for your yard.
Using different plants is one of the easiest and the best front yard landscaping ideas that you can use. Ideas for plants are numerous and vary widely from person to person. Selecting the best plants is often the most tedious and demanding part of working out your front yard landscaping ideas because it requires knowledge of the plants and depends on things like: - light conditions, wind, and how much time you can spend on maintaining and caring for it. Etc.
You can use flowers to line your sidewalk leading to the front door or along your driveway or in flowerbeds that will accent the front of your home. Flowers of different colors can blend harmoniously in landscape designs and evoke different emotions. In landscaping designs, green is believed to have a healing effect, red and orange rouse excitement and energy, and blue relaxes and refreshes. Flowers are great, but don't forget the characteristics of a plant's branching pattern and foliage. Varying form and texture is one way to bring diversity.

To add scale to the front yard design, you could plant a tree someplace near the middle or one at each end of the yard. Although tree and shrub possibilities are limited by your space, don't despair! Dwarf varieties and slower growing trees such as Japanese maples can, and should, be used to provide focal points though in the confined area of a city garden, you do not want too many features to compete. I definitely like using some nice small evergreen trees as you can frame in the porch or front steps with them, however don’t plant them to close to the house or to each other. Nothing looks worse then overgrown trees covering up the front of your house.

Having a sitting area in your front yard is another idea your might want to try as it can create a wonderful place to visit with neighbors, observe the daily happenings on your street or even watch your kids while they play. Of course you will need something both attractive and comfortable to sit on like a teak wave bench from Teaks n More.

The beauty of home front yard landscaping is that it does not have to be hard and much of it can be done by you. All it will take is a little elbow grease and some time to spare and you can design your own home front yard landscape quickly and easily. Invest a little time and energy to achieve the aesthetic appeal you want for your front yard, and it may turn out to be one of the most rewarding investments you make.

Looking at front yard design “by the yard”

Components of a Beautiful Yard

What are some of the components that make a landscape "really attractive"? We are going to explore some ideas over the next few weeks. I will begin with some broad brush strokes, and then focus in on some specific areas of your yard.

Whenever you are designing anything, there are some basic designing elements that underlie all design. These basic elements serve as the foundation in the design process. And so it is with landscape design. We must know and learn how to use these basic designing elements if we are going to be effective in our landscape design.

The basic elements of design are:
- Form: Shape i.e. circular, oval, columnar, are examples of form.
- Scale: Is simply the size of one component relative to adjacent components.
- Line: Refers to the how the viewer's eyes move as they look at something.
- Color
- Texture: Is seen as surface quality of an object as coarse, medium or fine.

These same fundamental elements also serve as building blocks for implementing principles for designing a picture perfect yard.

Some of the specific areas of our yards we want to look at over the next while are:
- The front yard, yes I know it isn’t our back yard but it is a very important part of making our over all landscape design one that is really attractive.
- Entryway Landscaping
- Foundation Plantings
- Hedges, Living Walls and Flowering Shrubs
- Fencing to Frame your yard
- Trees, which ones do I use
- What part does water play
- Flowering Shrubs

Some people think they can’t design while others take their designing skills for granted. We all have tastes, likes and dislikes and together we are going to discover what works and what doesn’t in our yards.

While hiring a professional landscaper serves many purposes, especially for large or difficult yards, they can cost a lot of money. So before you go ahead and hire someone, knowing a little bit can help you not only understand what they are saying but help you determine if they really are the right ones to work on your yard. On the other hand, if you only have a small space in your yard, you do not really have to spend so much money on complicated and extensive landscaping designs and with a little understanding and help you can often do it yourself.

Landscaping is a fun way to express yourself and make your home your own. If you aren’t a designer and you can’t afford a professional gardener, there is still a lot you can do, on your own, to make your yard come to life. Next time you can discover how to say, "Welcome to my Home" the way you want by redesigning your front yard.

Looking at Basic Design Elements “by the yard”