Framing Your Home Through Landscape Design

While we all admire beautiful plants, this admiration is not always a good enough reason to purchase a plant and take it home with us. In fact, to invest in outdoor plants without at least a basic design concept in mind is to risk losing out on the full potential of the plants in a landscape. As I’ve said many times before, every plant should serve a purpose, and proper design can help you determine what that purpose should be. Just a few basic guidelines can go a long way toward helping to plan a satisfying setting for your home.

Every yard can be divided into public and private areas. There is an unseen line on the sides of a home, midway from front to rear that extends into the side yards. The front yard is considered the public area and the rear, the more private area. The public area is used to give a home a setting for passersby and ourselves as we come and go. This can be better understood if the house is considered a painting and the landscaping is considered the frame. The public area is generally slightly formal, or at least more organized along the lines of the architecture. The private area, though, is where we can satisfy our needs and whims for a garden, shade, play areas, service areas, patios or decks and unique color schemes or fragrances. Because the two areas serve different purposes in our landscapes, it is natural that we should treat them differently.

In the public area, we need to use plants to soften the corners of our home and enhance visual and physical movement like sidewalks or driveways. We also want to add sufficient color to coordinate with the house without detracting from it. My recommendation is no more than three foliage and/or flower colors or the look becomes busy and cluttered.

In the private area of the landscape, it is important to place trees so that they provide shade and other background enhancements, but we also need to place these trees so that they complete the top of our “frame” as seen from the front of the home. Other than that, backyard planting should be fun and carefree and designed also for the view out from the inside summer and winter. In other words, pick several vantage points from inside your home and landscape with the intent of making a pleasant view. Also, to give the yard continuity, deal in repetition and focal points. The repetition can be a color, or a plant, or a shape, but it should make the viewer feel as if things belong together and pull the eye from one place to another. Your focal points can be plants, trees or physical objects such as statues or ponds. With the changing seasons, it is likely that the focal points will change as often as weekly, but this only serves to provide interest and diversion.

In addition, you can use landscaping to screen (block out) a view or enhance one by partially screening it and creating a hint of mystery to draw people in.

Finally, It is important to look ahead to your plants’ more mature sizes. The basic time consideration for most plantings is twelve to twenty years and you should plant accordingly. It will also be simpler to create your ideal landscape if your plan for and put in the trees first. They should be second only to your lawn, which if well trimmed and cared for, can do much to also contribute to a proper setting.

Although these are very general guidelines for landscape design, it is my hope that you can use these thoughts, together with the cultural conditions of various parts of your yard, to create a landscape that is pleasing to behold 24 hours a day all year long and functional as well.