With a few design principles in place, it’s easy to enhance your landscape’s allure and create a charming scene.
You don’t need to be an expert to make your yard visually appealing and elevate your property’s worth. Try these seven simple design tips for a striking landscape:
- Plant in odd numbers. Group the same kind of plant in odd-numbered groupings (three plants, five plants, seven plants) to provide an instant visual logic and varied texture to your landscape plan.
- Combine spikes and mounds. Use a balance of spiky plants and mounding perennials for drought-tolerant texture. Try plants with long, thin leaves (like muhly grass, red yucca or nolina) for your “spikes.” Combine them with “mounds” of low-growing salvia, lantana or flame acanthus.
- Include landscape layers. Vertical layers of trees, shrubs, perennials and groundcovers can provide privacy, create a sense of abundance and support wildlife. Review plant tags to help you place the tallest plants in the back and shorter plants in front. Adapt as needed, as most landscape beds can be viewed from multiple angles.
- Create a “backbone” for your garden. Often forgotten, evergreen plants are the “backbone” of a design, drawing interest even in winter. Use shrubs like boxwood, holly and cenizo or include plants with an architectural form such as agave, palm or bunchgrass. The leaves of grasses may turn brown in winter but their billowing shape and seedheads still provide a statement.
- Lay out the edges of landscape beds using curved lines. Straight lines lead your eye right to the end — often a fence or a property line — and can come across as boring and underwhelming. Use gently curving lines instead, to soften hard edges and lead the eye along to points of interest.
- Mind the gap. Define lawns clearly with pathways to visually separate grass from landscape beds. Use flagstones, stepping stones, or even artificial pavers to create an intentional look and a pathway, and to articulate the area to be mowed.
- Super-size your landscape beds, not your grass. Mulched landscape beds will always look better than your turf grass in South-Central Texas. Reverse the usual formula by making your landscape beds grass. A small “lilypad” of grass is the perfect size for a lawn in San Antonio — enabling you to maintain the open look of a small patch of turfgrass while watering minimally, when needed.
With a few design principles in place, you can easily enhance your landscape’s allure and create a charming scene.
