Why Improve Your Landscape?

Creating a favorable first impression when a visitor or potential buyer first views your home helps send a message about the care you’ve put into your home both inside and outside. Is there anything more important than a good first impression? We all care about home’s appearance, but making smart decisions about your landscape can develop curb appeal and that means more resale value. So whether you simply want to look presentable, solve some problems or add some amenities explained below, be sure and let your landscape designer know your goals.

Enhance your outdoor living style: An effective landscape should be patterned to your lifestyle, budget and your time constraints. It can provide effective circulation patterns, spaces for entertainment, leisure activities, and play areas for your children. Hardscape features like walk ways, terracing, walls, fences, decks, patios, arbors, grilling, and water features solve problems and bring enjoyment.

Get Involved in your landscape: What does a golfer, a business owner, a cook, a mom and a gardener have in common? They can directly sense the satisfactions of their hard work. Sure, moms work the hardest, but there’s nothing like creating the correct growing conditions for your favorite plants and watching them grow, flourish and change throughout the seasons.

Enjoy the wonders of nature with your children by experiencing the constant changes in plant material. There is a science class right there at your feet. For a great book on getting your children involved in gardening see “A Child’s Garden” and other great landscape books, available throughwww.Timberpress.com

Create level areas in your yard for desired activities and for creating a more interesting look. With soil left over, mounding with gentle berms can also create an exciting, sense of closure look. Try and stay away from small decorative walls on steep slopes when a properly chosen cascading groundcover or planting can improve the look, solve erosion problems and save you money.

Create shade…planting the correct tree, in the proper spot can have a major impact on the look of your home and also create shade to cool you and your house. Deciduous trees do double duty by also allowing winter sun to warm your house. Try and expand your horizon beyond oaks and maples. Installing trees should be a part of the first phase of your project.

Create a look you like: Think about styles you like and remember that attractive landscapes don’t focus on the look of individual plants, but the relationships among the elements. Plant combinations blended with hardscaping(patios etc.) come a live by contrasting hard with soft, evergreen with deciduous, plant heights, shapes and of course color and textures. There really is a science to creating beauty. An attractive landscape doesn’t have to be filled with expensive, large plant material or tons of hardscaping for immediate impact that can look like a jungle in five years. Smart design doesn’t have to be expensive, it simply thinks about tomorrow, respects your budget, and allows time to work for you. The greatest landscapes are well designed and grow to be what you envisioned.

Screen the undesirable: There are tasteful ways to screen your neighbor’s jungle gym, so be smart and friendly to your neighbor and don’t plant a line of Leyland Cypress. Evergreens certainly screen year round but a mix of deciduous, evergreen trees, shrubs and grasses with different sizes and shapes can create a more natural look. Mounding to create soil berms can also create a nice effect.

Solve drainage and erosion problems: From French drains,(no, French drains are not native to France. They are actually name after a man name French!) to landscape erosion fabric, let an expert make sure your crawl space stays dry, your soil doesn’t wash away, and water reservoirs don’t develop on your property.

Intangibles: Deep within each of us lies a garden. Most of us have memories of our childhood, when we first interacted with the outdoors. Do you remember yours? Perhaps it was that tree you always had to climb, the lawn that was the playground for all your activities, a hill to sled down, a stream you and your friends followed, that widen as it flowed into the unknown and beyond your childhood fears. Those memories are in our imagination.