In many ways, home landscaping is an art where it is very important to know what you want and also very important to know when to quit. This means that landscaping your home is about wanting it to make a beautiful, perhaps even stunning, statement without being such an exquisite creation that it turns into a gigantic drain on your time and financial resources just to keep it looking fairly good.
You want to enjoy your beautiful new yard, not just labor in it. With that in mind, here are a few ideas to help you strike the perfect balance between fantastic and practical.
Mix Things Up
One thing to pursue is diversity. You want a range of low-maintenance landscaping choices that will complement each other. Towering snow-clad evergreens are wonderful winter focal points, but you want to have something more brightly seasonal when spring rolls around.
Lovely flowering trees can offer a brilliant blaze of vibrant color, particularly when framed by those majestic evergreens.
Low-Maintenance Is Key
Not a lot of yard care gets performed in the winter months, but you will want something that is easy to get ready for the growing season once the weather starts to warm up. After all, landscaping for homes is all about getting things spruced up quickly and then spending a glorious summer enjoying it with as little additional maintenance as possible.
Firing up your trusty Toro Ride On mower and watching the sprinklers do their thing is about as much work as you really want to perform when the outdoor entertainment season arrives.
Plan Smart
When you map out a new plan for how to landscape your home, you need to think about ways in which your new design can provide practical as well as ornamental value to your property. New walkways, particularly if cunningly lighted, can provide both everyday utility as well as amazing nighttime visual imagery.
Since the whole point of the great outdoors is to get out there and revel in it, building a new deck or patio has long been a staple of the industry and is of particular value when thinking about the added value of landscaping to sell your home.
Patios become, in effect, an extra room of the house and add considerable value when it comes time to sell, not to mention how enjoyable they are in the meantime.
Grass For Versatility
While recent trends have aimed at de-emphasizing expansive lawns, it is important to recognize the value of grass as a soft, safe play space for the children as well as a luxuriant place for grownups to relax upon as well.
A small patch of green is fine for the front yard but you will want a larger spread in the back simply because so many fun outdoor sports and activities can be enjoyed more on grass than on any other surface.
Piece By Piece
Of course, home landscaping can be about the process as well as the destination. In many cases, particularly involving new families just starting out, it is not practical to carry out all of the desired improvements at a single time. This does not mean that giving up is the right idea.
Slow and steady often wins the race. Start right now, even if it is just to plant a single tree that will be a magnificent fully-developed specimen by the time other parts of the landscaping equation fall into place.
Ultimately, the key to landscaping your home is to have a plan that encompasses both practical value as well as architectural vision. Do not allow yourself to over-engineer to the point where you can no longer enjoy your creation. Work steadily towards your anticipated end-state, and always remember to enjoy the fruits of your planning and labor.
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