One thing that can make your house stand out from the rest of your neighbours humble abodes is great design is your front yard landscape. Where I live every evening, many of my neighbours fo for walks in the evening and as I see them walk by they all seem to look at how your yard looks. Our neighbourhood is new and I have a tree that the builder put in and a new lawn, but I find that it is no enough just to have a tree in your yard without any flowers, shrubs or additional trees that can make your home pop with beauty. If your home is older and maybe there are too many trees and your shrubs are overgrown, maybe it is time to remove your old trees and start fresh again and let the natural sunlight back in to your property.
A great place to begin looking for ideas on how to landscape a front yard, is in your own backyard or neighbourhood. There are a couple of homes in my neighbourhood that have beautiful front yards. One front yard has some large rocks stacked on top of each other and has a lot of soil with many different types of perennials, flowers and shrubs. Another yard has used interlocking stone to create a flower bed all along the driveway and around the front of the house. I got out my digital camera and started photographing yards that I like and put together a portfolio of ideas from there. Then I visited my local landscaper and asked what kinds of trees complement certain bushes, and what types of perennials work well in shade or full sun and which ones grow faster than others and need to be pruned on a regular basis. |
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If you would like to have a great design just like you neighbours, you may need to look beyond their yards and at some professional ideas that are available online and offline. There are many magazines and websites that have color images of beautiful front yard landscaping designs. Depending on the climate that you live in you will most likely be able to incorporate some of the ideas into your own front yard landscape plan, just check which zone you live in for your selected plants and trees. |
Another way to get a sense of which plants thrive in your area is a visit to the local gardening store. Here you’ll not only find all types of plants, flowering bushes and shrubs, but you’ll also be able to talk to individuals who are experienced in landscaping. Many of the people who work at gardening stores have knowledge about landscaping a front yard. They can offer suggestions as to what plants would work well together to create the look that you desire, and they may have landscape design software that can layout a design with all your ideas put together at no charge since you will be buying from them.
It may seem that you’ll need to spend a lot of money to spruce up the exterior of your home. This need not be the case as you can still create a beautiful front yard landscape design on a budget by doing a lot of the work yourself with the help of some friends or family. Kids love to get their hands dirty and it's fun to get the whole family involved in the process. The key is finding plants, shrubs and trees that are affordable and then using them to their full advantage. A good example is purchasing some flowering trees that will bloom each spring. You can buy these when they are seedlings, which cost much less than a mature tree does. Each year it will fill out more, eventually creating a wonderful shady corner to the yard. Your local hardware store or home improvement store will have bulbs at a fraction of the cost of full flowering bushes or shrubs, so you can save lots of money by buying them as bulbs. If you are well organized you can provide the labor yourself and save money there as well or hire an independant gardener that you can work with and save on the additional labor that other big landscaping companies will charge.
Always bear in mind that any project like this should be viewed as a work in progress. You can add a new element to your front yard landscape design each season as your budget affords it. This helps to spread the cost over time and also allows you the chance to enjoy gardening as a hobby and watch your new creation grown each passing year as you add new things such as a water fountain, bird bath, wildlife feeders, rocks, lighting, new trees and more.
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