The green space around your home defines the ambiance of the entire property. Whether your front walk is lined with beautiful flowers or your back garden is an arboreal escape will shape how you enjoy your home and what guests experience when they come to visit. Fortunately, changing your landscaping can also help redefine your home’s outdoor spaces.
The front yard, the back garden, and everything in between can be reinvented with just a few pavers, flower bed dividers, and the latest in 2022 Landscaping design trends. Here at Quality Accents, we are dedicated to helping homeowners create gorgeous home landscapes that are up to your standards of beauty, form, and function. Let’s dive right into the landscaping ideas:
1) Welcome Guests With an Arbor Gate
An arbor over your garden gate offers a cheerful yet formal way to greet your guests. Arbors stand out and make a splash against other architectural or landscaping features in the area. Also, they draw the eye to the gate itself.
A gate arbor can be round or squared, simple or elaborate. Some have trellises and are home to vines winding upward and dripping down the arbor. Some are clean and beautiful, keeping their original fresh cut or freshly stained shine.
2) Set Paths With Pavers or Handmade Stepping Stones
Walking paths are essential for any lawn or yard large enough. Whether you are traversing flowerbeds and obstacles or keeping bare feet safe from the underbrush, stepping stones are a fun way to provide footpaths. Wide, flat pavers offer the safest option in terms of safe traversing for people who may be unstable on their feet. For uneven walks, don’t forget just a few feet of hand-railing can transform an unstable experience.
Handmade stepping stones poured or painted by children and members of the family are heartwarming choices. You can place them in the front yard in a path from the mailbox to the front door. You can also create a winding back garden path of homemade pavers to a private play area just for the kids.
3) Shade Windows With Flowering Bushes
Did you know that flowering bushes are among the best thing to have outside your window? A growing bush provides shade to your window and the surrounding wall while soaking up all the sunlight for itself. This reduces heat in any shaded room which can lower your power bill. But the fun doesn’t stop there. A flowering bush also provides privacy if you don’t close the curtains and indirect sunlight that rarely to never dazzles your eyes.
Any ground-floor window can be protected, shaded, and made private by the addition of a single flowering bush.
4) Create Dynamic Layers With Raised Flower Beds
Your front or back garden doesn’t have to be all the same level. Using raised flower beds and landscaping edging, you can define different spaces of flower beds and planters that rise above the baseline level of the yard. You can craft what feels like terraced gardens or sunk-down walkways while enjoying the visual delight that is created by a multi-level garden design.
Most yards that enjoy raised flower beds got there first by envisioning raised flower beds on a flat green expanse, and you can too.
5) Build Around Your Best Tree
Do you have a beautiful tree in your front or back yard? Make it a part of your landscaping plan by building around it. A tree close to your back door can be fully wrapped in a deck with a light railing around the opening so that your wonderful tree can be appreciated by every backyard guest.
A great tree out on its own in the yard will look beautiful with a wrap-around bench that transforms your tree into a beautiful place to sit and the perfect first step to climbing the tree.
6) Envision a Pebble Creek and a Garden Bridge
One of the most elegant landscaping features is the pebble creek – a little dry river through your yard where the bed is lined with smooth pebbles or large river stones. These dry creeks are not just beautiful, they are also a very effective yard drainage tool that can help ensure that the water from heavy rains flows neatly through your yard and toward the best area of your neighborhood to quickly drain.
Not only can you build yourself a pebble creek, but you can also put a lovely little bridge over it. These bridges are a gateway to imagination and adventure for children and add an element of delight for adults on a garden walk.
7) Grade a Field for Soccer or a Playground Set
If you have children, consider grading your back garden flat instead of landscaping layers. Choose a few open square yards of land and ask your landscapers to flatten it, with flower beds edged and protected around the sides. You can place soccer goals in this flat space, pave it for a large patio and sports court, or even use this as a foundation for a new and sturdy play set.
Grading and leveling are powerful tools in landscaping, especially when there are little ones at play.
8) Arboreal Garden Path With Hidden Seating Areas
Another option is to build your back garden with as much lush foliage as possible. Make your garden burst with plant life – then carve a beautiful winding path through the space. You want guests to feel that they could get quite enjoyably lost in your backyard. And just when they think they’ve reached the depth of your beautiful garden walk, surprise amblers with a cozy reading area or old porch swing nestled into the greenery and hidden from the back porch through heavy bushes and flowering trees.
This little arboreal nook may become your favorite escape to catch naps or dreamy episodes of your favorite podcast in the sun-dappled shade.
9) Plant Flowers for Butterflies, Hummingbirds, and Honey Bees
If you’re hoping to see more butterflies, hummingbirds, or honey bees in your garden, you can plant for this. The right brightly colored flowering plants will attract exactly the type of beautiful creatures you want to see. A garden of flowers will almost always attract butterflies. On the other hand, flowering trees and bushes of the right variety are more likely to please hummingbirds. If there are any in your neighborhood, they will soon find the delicious bonanza of flowers to eat and begin favoring your space. This will be especially true if you hang a hummingbird feeder of sugar water outside your back window.
10) Xeriscape With Low-Water Local Wildlife
Last but never least, try an eye-catching xeriscaped approach. Xeriscaping is landscaping using plants that need very little water to survive. It makes these gardens much friendlier to drought and water shortages. Xeriscaped gardens should focus on local plant life that is particularly hard to drought. Xeriscaped gardens are also often blended with colorful rocks or woodchips. These make your flowerbeds beautiful without having to fill every inch with thirsty little flowers.
Landscaping is a wonderful way to reshape and reclaim your front yard and back garden. If you are making new flower bed shapes or freshening up old flower beds, rely on beautiful poly landscape edging for appearance and long-term high performance in keeping your flower beds exactly where they should be. Contact us today to learn more.