Plan Your Backyard Landscaping Carefully

By Stacy Jennson

Landscaping is the art of gardening and the science of beautifying your surroundings. It entails planting, growing, building, installing, constructing, and sculpting in a large scale. The landscaper must be in tune with the earth, and with the site he wants to develop and beautify. Lighting, wind, and weather conditions are all-important components in a landscapers repertoire of resources.

Aside from this, the landscaper must know a bit of the flora and fauna of the particular land he is to landscape. The plants he will put in the garden must be of the right type for that kind of soil. It must be resistant to the endemic pests in the area. It must survive that kind of weather conditions. And it must not be harmful to the existing species therein. After such practical considerations, then the aesthetics can come in.

Designing a garden will allow you to pick from a wide spectrum of colors, shapes and sizes of plants and flowers. There are plants that have purple, yellow, blue, pink, and red colors and of course there are also vines and shrubs that have all sorts of looks. You will also need to decide whither you want your trees and plants to be evergreens where they always stay green or whether you want ones that lose their leave at winter time.

The plants will be chosen for looks, as well as for functional purposes. Plants can help bring shade to a house, they can be of use as hedges and natural walls, they can help to screen out sound from a busy street or a noisy neighbor, and they can bring in the birds too. Landscaping ideas for a front yard put all these consideration.

For backyard landscaping, lots of other ideas come to mind. Front yards are often designed to be pretty while backyards get more use from kids and pets. If you have a young family with children, your backyard will be a private place where they can play in the grass and throw a ball around. You will want to make sure you keep enough free space for those activities while surrounding the yard on the edges with pretty plants. Landscaping for an older couple with no children might be completely different, as you might want a stream or some type of running water in place of the play area. Backyard landscaping ideas will be different for every person and every couple depending on their needs at that moment in time. - 29954

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