While many people head straight to their local gardening supply store to browse the selections, creating a plan beforehand will help you chose plants that will best fit your needs and thrive in your landscape.
It's easy to go out and be tempted into buying plants that look beautiful at the garden store, only to get them home and realize they are wrong for your landscape. These tips will help you develop a plan and put you on the road to creating a beautiful, cohesive, and thriving landscape.
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The topography of your site is important to consider as well as you plan; take note of how water drains in your landscape. The best landscape design will promote water movement away from your home towards other areas of your yard.
Think about who will be using your yard and how they will use it. Will children be using your yard? Do you have pets? Are you hoping to use your yard for outdoor entertaining? Remember you can create different spaces for different uses in your landscape using strategic plantings and hardscapes. Walkways can be used to move people from one area to another.
Since you will be using and maintaining your yard (or hiring someone to maintain it) consider what your maintenance style and budget are. Be as realistic as you can. How much time will you truly have to put into your landscape? Or if you won't have the time will you have the money to pay someone else to put in the time? How much do you have to invest in your landscape? Determining the answer to these questions will help to ensure the success of your landscape for years to come.
A theme can unify your landscape and help guide your plant and material selections. Themes can be as simple as using consistent shapes or forms throughout your yard or as complex as creating a relaxation garden or an Oriental garden.
Themes can help guide how you place and select plants, decorations, hardscapes, and structures. Are you someone who wants lots of neat, geometric shapes and structures in your landscape? Do you want softer lines and a more natural feel to your space? Do you want a landscape to include only specific colors? Questions like these will help you choose a unified theme for your garden.
In order to get the most out of your yard, think of it as another room, or rooms, in your home. Just as a home has well defined and carefully planned rooms, so should your landscape; using your materials wisely allows you can create different "rooms" in your landscape.
Don't forget to think about how you'll link your spaces. How will people move from one area of your yard to another? Create openings to encourage exploration in your yard and keep people moving throughout the landscape.
Early in your planning you should determine how your plants will function in your landscape. Plants can be used in a number of ways, they can provide you with fresh and delicious fruits and vegetables, beautiful scenery, lovely aromas, and much more.
Plants can be used as barriers to define areas within your landscape as well as identify where your landscape ends. You can use plants to create physical barriers in your landscape by blocking both views and access to an area. If you want to keep your views open, but maintain some barriers, low growing plants can be used to create implied barriers, blocking access but not the view.
Correctly placed plants can also be used to alter your landscape site conditions. Temperature, light levels, and wind are greatly affected by the trees and plants in a landscape. The noises in your landscape can be affected by what you put into the design, such as water features or bird houses, as well as any physical barriers that keep your garden insulated from noises beyond your landscape.
Using unique plants, distinct structures, or garden ornaments allows you to highlight a particular area of your landscape. Contrasting shapes, textures, sizes, and colors will help to capture attention and direct it to a specific area.
Don't just think about visuals; taking into consideration the scents of the plants you select for your landscape can enhance the experience you create for those in your garden. Think about when flowers will be blooming and fragrant, as well as what scents will complement each other in the landscape.
More specifically, take into account how the passage of time will affect your landscape plants. When selecting plants, make sure you consider the plant's growth rate, maintenance needs, and its eventual mature size. Make sure you provide your plants with enough room to reach their mature size. Keep in mind though, that mature size is typically based on optimal growing conditions, your landscape's specific conditions may cause a plant to grow larger or smaller.
Before removing plants from your landscape, determine whether these plants truly need to be removed, or if they could be relocated to another area of your yard. When selecting new plants, look for resource-efficient plants, ones that will require less water, fertilizers, and pesticides.
When planning the changes to your landscape, consider installing a rainwater catchment system which will provide you with an environmentally sustainable source of irrigation water. With careful planning such a system can even be incorporated as an aesthetic design element.
Using environmentally friendly hardscapes, non-toxic preservatives, stains, paints, and cleaners is another way you can protect your natural resources. Also, consider reusing construction materials; before demolition starts consider what materials you might be able to reuse, repurpose, or incorporate into your new landscape design.
The purpose of landscape design software can vary depending on the user. Some people will use these tools to accurately transfer an idea from their mind onto a screen or a printed piece of paper, as a means of helping them visualize what their garden might look like before they commit to making any permanent changes. This is a huge help because it means you can make design decisions virtually rather than in reality, which could save you time and money compared to if you jumped straight in to physically landscaping your garden and made a mistake. Similarly, for a homeowner, a landscape design software gives you the opportunity to fully consider all of your design options and allows you to maximize your space.
If you are not a DIY enthusiast, you might instead prefer to employ a contractor to complete your landscape project. Landscape design software can be helpful in this instance as a means of accurately conveying to your contractor exactly how you would like your garden to look. Anyone who has tried to describe a hairstyle to a stylist rather than take a photo to the hair salon will know that it is easy for spoken descriptions to get lost in translation, and the same can be said of landscape design.
You might think that sketching up a quick idea with pencil and paper would work just as well, but proportions can be incorrect and spaces not accurately represented. If you want a guaranteed way of ensuring your contractor fully understands what you want your finished outdoor space to look like, then a model created using landscape design software is your safest bet. Most programs will allow you to print your designs, while some also have sharing capabilities so you can forward designs to contractors via email, or share them on a community platform. These features are also helpful as they enable you to share designs with friends and family to get feedback and suggestions before you proceed with any real changes.
SketchUp is globally known as one of the best landscape design software; however, to get the best out of this program, you will need to upgrade to the paid version, which costs $695 for a lifetime license. The free version is a great way to try out the software before you commit to the subscription, or for students or small businesses to create impressive 3D models. Designers looking for more complex tools will probably need the full version.
One of the best things about this designer is the sheer number of different types of plants it includes, making it especially useful to anyone who wants to be specific about the trees, shrubs, and flowers they have in their design. It also features care information for plants, which will help the user keep their garden in excellent condition once they have carried out their physical design. Another great feature of this app is that you can adjust the climate settings to fit in line with your own local climate. In doing this, the planner will then only suggest to you plants that are appropriate for growing in your climate, taking the guesswork out of planting for anyone who is less experienced with plants or unsure which species will grow best in their area. The planner operates in 3D design, but you can, at any time, switch the planner to a birds-eye view to see the design from a different angle.
One of the things users love about this app is its ability to print not just the design model, but also a list of all the items you will need to complete your design in real life. This is especially handy if you want to landscape your garden yourself, as you will have an instant list to take with you when you go shopping. Alternatively, you could give the print outs to your hired landscaper to make sure that they fully understand exactly what you want from your new garden.
The software is easy to use, and in fact this is one of the best elements of the tool. Users love how intuitive it is, and how quickly they can see and understand what possible changes would look like on their very own property. The software has a large library of items you can add to your landscape, such as plants and garden furniture, and it also has a number of pre-designed plans to help you get ideas and inspiration if you are struggling with knowing where to start. Where this program excels compared with similar design software, is its strong online community. Once you have designed your landscape you can upload it to the community forum where other like-minded people can comment or make suggestions on your design. This is great if you are looking for potential ideas or adjustments on your design, or even if you are just wanting some reassurance that your design looks good and is practically feasible before you start making physical changes in your yard. 2ff7e9595c
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