Savvy Landscaping: Landscape Design, Ideas, Photography, and More » Landscaping Plans

Tips and Tricks for Adding Curb Appeal to Your Landscape

Jennifer — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:33:19 +0000

With a little ingenuity and Knock Out roses you can transform your landscape into a real stunner.

(ARA) – You only get one chance for your home to make a first impression. With a little help from Mother Nature, you can demand a second look from passersby with a show-stopping front yard.

“Every canvas needs to start fresh and clean,” says James A. Baggett, editor of Country Gardens Magazine. “So roll up your sleeves, stick your hands in the dirt and get ready to personalize your yard with color and style.”

With a little ingenuity you can transform a ho-hum landscape into a real stunner with these simple tips that add professional-looking curb appeal to your home:

* First things first
You can’t enhance anything until you have a clean slate. So mow the lawn, get rid of the weeds, rake up and dispose of any leaves, edge the sidewalks and remove the grass growing between concrete seams and brick pavers. Prune the trees — especially the ones near or touching the roof — and add a layer of dark, natural mulch to any flower beds or under trees.

* Cover up the bald spots
Now you need to take a good look at your yard. How can you enhance your best features and minimize your worst? Here’s a great trick: Print photos in black and white and you’ll easily see the problem areas. Determine what “flaws” you want to fix. To update your look, fill empty spaces and add interest to a drab corner or “hide” unsightly spots with colorful, ever-blooming plants like the very popular shrub roses in The Knock Out family (www.TheKnockOutFamily.com). Available in seven shades ranging from raspberry pink to soft yellow, there is a Knock Out rose to fit any homeowner’s taste and landscaping style while providing year-round curb appeal.

Add interest to a drab corner or "hide" unsightly spots with colorful, ever-blooming Knock Out shrub roses.

* Put out the welcome mat
The entry garden is the most visible garden space and sets the mood for your entire home. Whether formal or relaxed, it should draw your eye toward the front door. Plant a pair of carefully pruned boxwoods on either side of the front door to add symmetry. Add a light fixture that matches the home’s exterior and shows your personal taste.

* Contain yourself
For those with minimal or no yard, or if you just want the elegance and ease of containers, pot up pretty annuals and perennials around your entrance, mailbox or along the front walk. To have striking color year after year, use perennials for fistfuls of continuous blooms that help stretch your dollars. Yellow and red are hot colors this year so plant the newest Sunny Knock Out rose paired with your favorite red annuals to be in step with the latest trends.

* Express yourself
Decorate a garden with a favorite antique, treasured collectible or statue. Look for objects such as driftwood, rocks or even empty mailboxes to punctuate certain areas. Use color to attract the eye. Paint your front door a bold, welcoming color or try a bright, punchy color on the shutters.

* Plan for sustainability
Look for plants that are easy to grow, save water and don’t require a lot of work. Pick plants that are native to your area for low-maintenance beauty. Eco-friendly shrub roses are a great choice, especially when paired with perennials for year-round color.

Baggett thinks shrub roses are perfect for first-time homeowners since they are extremely easy to grow and are low-maintenance. “Shrub roses give you a lot of bang for your buck,” he says. “They are really no work for the homeowner — and don’t require spraying, harsh chemicals, pruning, deadheading or lots of water. They bloom from May to the first hard frost in the late fall, offering season-long color and visual impact in the home landscape.”

The most popular shrub roses are The Knock Out Family of roses. They are available in seven shades ranging from hot raspberry pink to soft yellow, fitting any homeowner’s taste and landscape style while providing continuous year-round curb appeal.

Enjoy the days you get outside to renew your yard and garden. You’ll have folks taking a second look. For more information on The Knock Out Family of roses visit www.theknockoutrose.com.

Courtesy of ARAcontent

Planning for the Future

Sirena Van Schaik — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 06:00:03 +0000

I am not a patient woman, at least when it comes to landscaping. I see the end result in my mind and I want to see it right away in my yard. I don’t want to wait for the years that it takes for a tree to reach maturity and I don’t want to have to wait until my budget allows me to fulfill every desire that I have for my yard. In everything else in life, I am fairly patient but for some reason, I long for the days when I can see my planning come to a realization and I can sit on my patio and enjoy the crisp morning in a perfectly landscaped yard.

Now besides me coming off as a completely impatient woman that is almost unbearable, I thought I would look at planning a landscape for the future. This is a great way to continually build on your yard and to see improvements each year without having to wait for all the trees and bushes to mature and for everything else to fall into place.

When you sketch your garden out on a piece of paper, you will probably be sketching for the end result of your landscaping, taking into account full sizes for trees, plants and anything else that you are putting in. The whole problem with this type of planning is that you will end up having a lot of empty spaces for several years since it takes time for a landscaped yard to take full effect. So, instead of dealing with all those gaps, plan your landscape for the future.

First, before you do anything else, take a look at your end design. How big is it? how big are the plants that you are putting in? If they are larger sized plants and shrubs, then you aren’t going to need to plan for the future garden too much. If you are starting with young plants, you are going to have a few years to wait for them to grow to the desired size.

Now that you have accessed that, take your garden plan and chop your garden beds into thirds. This is the best way to plan a garden. In the center are the taller bushes and perennials that are going to take some time to grow. When you get outside and put your plan to good use, you will want to dig out the first ring of gardens for the first year.

Fill that first tier of planting with the desired plants and to deal with some of the sparseness, plant some annuals as filler. The second or even third year, move out to the next level and expand your flower beds. Repeat what you did during the first year by adding the new plants that you wanted and filling in with annuals. This is also a great time to reassess what your gardening goals are and you can make some changes now instead of being stuck with a space that you just don’t like.

Lastly, finish the third tier of planting after another year or two. I am using the word tier just to differentiate between the expansions of the garden but it can be a level garden you are planning. Again, fill in with plants and annuals and then sit back and let the garden grow.

This may seem a bit more work but it gives you a chance to see how your garden is working and it will also stretch out the costs of landscaping through several years.

Below is a sketch of how to plan for the future garden. Please bear in mind that it is the levels I’m illustrating and I am by no means an artist.

Sirena Van Schaik

The Secret Ingredients To A Great Garden Are Landscaping Plans

Jennifer — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:09:20 +0000

Before you build a house, you go through so many tasks, formalities and plans. In fact, no home today can be built without a set of Government approved plans. You want to become an engineer, a doctor, an actor – you need to take a hold of your fate and plan for your dream career. You have achieved a foothold in your favorite company and you need to make your mark quickly – you make a plan that would help you with your promotion, and so on.

What is common to all the above tasks? The answer is the word ‘plan’. This word can always make a world of difference in anything you do because when you plan you anticipate each and every step of the way, thereby ensuring your success better than when you approach the task in a haphazard manner.

How Can Landscaping Plans Help?

First of all landscaping plans would ensure that the end result is what you wanted to have in the first place. In order to work out a great garden, however small, you would need to have two things steady in your mind’s eye – (1) how the end result should look and (2) what are the obstacles that you need to overcome to get this done.

Without a plan you would not know what, when or how to do anything because there would be no organization of thought or action. You would also have no visualization in your mind regarding how the place should ultimately look. Without these criteria, it would be impossible to coordinate the work or accomplish anything of real importance.

The landscaping plans would give you the required vision which would drive you to achieve your goal; it would also provide you with some indicators that would signify whether you are moving in the right direction or not. The landscaping plans would have to include everything to the minutest detail so you would know how much time, money and effort would be required for obtaining the picture-perfect garden.

The landscaping plans would also help to phase out the creation of your garden as you would definitely not be able to finish it in one go. You would know with the help of the plan what to do when in order to achieve the ultimate look you wanted to give your garden. Without a plan, however well the landscaping would be done, it would fail in the overall visual impact and even functionality, as it would not have had the capability to anticipate future requirements of land, plants and people for the garden in question.

Buy Only What You Need With Landscape Plans

Jennifer — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 22:31:03 +0000

So you’re all set to start your landscaping project. Or are you? You have a really good idea about what you need to buy, but could you answer how many square feet of pathways that you need to cover with gravel? You should definitely know exactly how much you’ll need in the way of supplies when you go shopping. To get an exact idea of how much you’ll need, you should draw up some landscape plans or look at some ones other people have used.

Save Money And Time

You buy all the materials you need to get started on your landscaping project, and once you do, you realize that you’ve bought far too much. For larger projects, you may have to find a way to dispose of several thousand pounds of stone, and nobody really wants to deal with that in the sweltering sun of summer, but you can’t just leave them laying in a pile in the front yard. Not only that, but you’ve spent several hundred dollars more than you needed to, but you could have prevented this mishap from occurring just by using landscape plans.

In your landscape plans, draw up the plans proportionally (meaning each area, such as the size of pathways and flower beds, should be in the same proportion to their actual size), so that various parts do not overlap when you get to working. Also, calculate how many square feet you’ll need to cover, and for flower beds and other elevated landscaping projects such as decorative walls, the volume of dirt and other materials that you’ll need. Ultimately, this will make sure that you buy exactly how much you need, and you won’t overspend or find yourself short in materials when you’re on the job.

Of course, you don’t have to develop your own set of plans. Many landscape plans already exist, in fact tens of thousands of great ones already exist that you can find in magazines, on television, and on the Internet. Some of the very best professionals in landscape architecture post free copies of their best plans online, and magazines showcase the most beautiful landscaping projects that they can find.

Not only that, but millions of people search for landscape plans online, so you’ll find many thriving communities of landscaping enthusiasts such as yourself ready and willing to help you on your landscaping project. To get started on your landscaping project, check out landscape plans.

Planning Your Yard With Landscape Drawings

Jennifer — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 21:52:10 +0000

When someone builds a house they start with blueprints that show where every door and window will be placed and develop a floor plan to make sure interior traffic flow is smooth. When planning the layout of the yard, landscape drawings can be every bit as useful in making sure the traffic flow outside is not interrupted by a errant shrub. In addition, detailed landscape drawings can also help determine how many flowers, shrubs, trees and hard materials will be needed to make the plan work.

Too many people walk through their yard and make snap decisions on where they would like to put a flower bed or maybe a short stone wall behind which they can plant a few bushes. By taking the time to develop landscape drawings they can get a better idea of how everything will look together. They can also give more consideration to whether or not a tree will hide windows or perhaps the roots will grow through the basement walls if it is planted too close to the home.

Knowing what the homeowner wants the exterior of their home to look like when they are done with their project can be a lot easier if they use landscape drawings to plan out where and what colors of flowers they will use to achieve a desired effect. Without good landscape drawings they may end up with a lawn that looks like an after thought.

Plan To Have All Materials On The Job

One of the most disappointing aspects of working on the yard’s design is running out of materials during the project. When the homeowner uses landscape drawings in the planning of the layout, they can also make a materials list of everything they will need to turn their dream into reality. Retaining wall, if needed, can be measured so that half way through the project they do not have to run back out to the store for more. All the while hoping the store has not run out of the ones they were using on the job.

For those homeowners that cannot draw a straight line with a ruler, there are home computer programs that allow them to make landscape drawings on their computer. From the free versions that offer some hope to the new home yard designer to the more elaborate ones that have color renditions of the most often uses botanicals that can be moved around the virtual screen, making landscape drawings with these programs can be done at any hour of the day or night.

Develop Landscaping Plans

Jennifer — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 01:28:17 +0000

It is important to develop landscaping plans otherwise you may end up finding later on that you are doing your landscaping in the wrong spot. Therefore, you end up wasting both your time and money on landscaping a yard that you are going to have to do all over again. You can prevent many mistakes from costing you extra time and money by carefully developing landscaping plans in advance before you start your project. The time and effort you put into planning will be well worth it later on down the line.

Landscaping plans may sound easy, but they actually require a lot of work. You need to do a thorough site analysis and assessment to do landscaping plans, a simple rudimentary knowledge of landscaping won’t help. Although landscaping plans will help you to avoid hazards, last minute changes and costly mistakes which make them well worth the effort and time you put into them. You should break your landscaping plans down into manageable tasks so that you don’t make any mistake when drawing up the plans. In addition, by have landscaping plans you will be able to stick to a good timetable and stay within a specific budget.

A Base Plan

Preparing a base plan of your property is the first step in landscaping plans. This should include the position and dimensions of your house and lot including the location of all utilities, garden plants you want to keep, property lines, buildings, driveways, walks, easements, topographic features and any ground characteristics. You should make sure you draw the base plan according to scale. All other plans will be done on trace paper on top of the base plan so you want to make sure you get it right. By being correct and accurate you can start off right with your landscaping plans.

A Site Analysis

The second step in landscaping plans is to conduct a site analysis. This requires examining all existing vegetation, natural features, house orientation and utilities. Look at the condition of existing vegetation and make sure you plans protect them. You should also make sure you plan to blend new plants into the natural environment. At this point you should also look into soil characteristics, rain fall distribution, wind pattern, micro-climatic conditions and land form. This will help you to selection what plants to purchase and where to place them, what is your surface water drainage requirements, the positioning of shade and where to place activity areas.

Finalizing

Finally you are ready to construct the final plan. This is where you will determine placement of flowers and plants in the landscaping plans. You will also start setting a working budget and finding the necessary materials you will need at this stage. Once you finalizing your landscaping plans you will also be able to set up a timeline to determine how long your project will take. The finalized plans should also help you to determine what maintenance is required and how to get the optimal use from your resources.