Category Archives: Yard & Outdoors

Helpful Landscaping Ideas

Helpful Landscaping Ideas

In architectural terms, landscaping means the art of modifying land areas through the use of natural, cultivated, or constructed elements in an organized manner and with accordance to a comprehensive yet aesthetic planning. If you are getting interested with this art, it is best to come up with fresh landscaping ideas to set your self apart from the rest.

Indeed, landscape design is one of those terms that can be quite overwhelming especially for neophytes. But, this doesn’t have to sound so intimidating because the underlying principles in it can be translated in simple terms or layman’s terms, so to speak. Once translated into less complicated terms, landscaping would be easily understood and more people can do it on their own.

Aiding the ideas of creation

If you new into landscaping, you need to landscaping ideas to help you create you own one. But, before going gaga over numerous landscaping ideas out there, you need to familiarize yourself first with the basics of the art. These include knowing the basic elements of landscape design such use of colors and its combination as well as the various color theories. The standards of forms, lines, scales, and textures should also be pondered upon.

To help you come up with your own landscaping project, here are some helpful landscaping ideas that you can use in order to enhance the beauty of your home or make your own personal space pleasing to the eye.

1. Always assimilate the hardscape into the initial and final landscape design. “Hardscape” refers to elements and features including fences and other decorations used in the garden as well as patios and decks because these will give a wonderful transition coming from your indoors to the outdoors of your garden. Always make sure that the elements used in hardscape will complement other elements such as plants.

2. Try building a dependable but fashionable set of fences. People might not notice it but fences—if placed and designed properly—can create a huge difference in the overall look of the house. When doing your own landscape, make sure that you invest on great-looking fence because it will be standard in the garden. To be more creative, try to use plants as a fence aside from using the traditional wood ones. Here, you have a unique and reliable fence that will speak of your distinct taste and preference. But, if you plan to use plants as fence, make sure that they are composed of shrubs so they will be easier to manage.

3. Consider using foliages and drought-tolerant plants to use. If you are not sure if you can take care of the plants in your garden regularly, make sure that you use plants that don’t need constant watering and taming.

4. Combine colors of plant foliages and flowers. To create an eye-catching landscaping, always think of the characteristics of the foliage. Make sure that the foliage of plants has various textures and colors to create easy patterns that are pleasing to eye.

5. Be experimental in choosing materials. One of the most refreshing landscaping ideas out there is the use of substitutes in place of the traditional ones. This is because in enables the designer to explore more possibilities and lets him or her to be more creative.

One good example is the use of wood chippers especially for those who constantly redesign their space. These are a good option especially for people who want to trim their growing plants often.

Landscaping DIY: Learning the Basics

Landscaping DIY: Learning the Basics

Landscaping DIY style can be successful only if one has learned about the basic principles regarding landscaping in general. Whether you are borrowing a certain landscaping idea that you found in a magazine or on the Internet, knowing about the basic landscaping principles would be able to help you understand what you would be doing later on. Knowing about these principles can even help you improve your own creativity as you try to develop your own landscaping ideas.

One of the basic principles of landscaping is aiming to achieve some form of unity in design. Unity, as a principle, should be considered as one of your main goals in landscaping design. Unity can either be applied in the form of consistency and repetition. Repetition creates unity in landscaping design by repeating similar elements such as plants, plant groups, or other types of decor throughout the landscape.

Consistency creates unity by enabling some or all of the various elements of a planned landscape to fit together and be considered as part of a whole. It can be achieved through the consistency of character of the different elements such as height, size, texture, color schemes, etc.

Another important principle essential for landscape design is balance. Balance is a sense of equality in the overall design. There are basically two types of balance being employed in landscape design. Symmetrical balance is characterized by the equal spacing of the matching elements in the garden design. A garden design strikes up a symmetrical balance when the elements share all or part of the same shape, form, groupings, colors, theme, etc.

Achieving asymmetrical balance in garden design can be a little more complex. While element characteristics such as textures, forms, colors may remain constant to create some unity, some shapes and design may be more random. In achieving this form of balance, it is often essential to makes use of separate or different themes in the landscape design but with each one having an equal yet different type of attraction.

Another principle to consider in landscape design is natural transition. This principle can be used to avoid radical or hasty changes in your landscape design. Transition is basically gradual change. It can best be shown in terms of plant height or color. Natural transition can also be applied to all the other elements in the landscape such as textures, shape and size of the different landscape elements.

The transition can be achieved in the natural means by gradual, ascending or descending, arrangement of different elements. A good example of achieving natural transition would be employing a stair step effect from large trees going to medium trees then to shrubs and then finally to bedding plants.

Simplicity is another basic landscaping principle that can be one of the best guidelines you can follow when just beginning landscaping DIY. The aim to just keep things simple can provide certain advantages to begin with. One is that you can achieve more by doing less. Improvements can be done later.

Picking two or three basic colors to use for the landscape and then repeat them throughout the garden design is a means of keeping things simple. Keeping the use of decor to a minimum and limited to a specific theme is also a means of achieving simplicity in garden design.

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