There’s no reason your yard shouldn’t be as pleasing and personal as the inside of your home. By utilizing principles of design, you can create an outdoor environment that is adaptable to all the uses you would like in your space. You can experience enduring pleasure in your property due to its beauty and how it reflects your taste and lifestyle. In other words, your outdoor environment is just as important as your indoor environment!

Begin your Landscape Design with a tour of your property. Evaluate the soil, sunlight, slope, and other factors. Measure out your property as if you were measuring the features on graph paper. Start at a corner of the house, for example, and measure out from the corner at right angles. Place all the features on a grid. Getting the feel for how the terrain slopes should be considered so you can properly place locations of things such as retaining walls and steps.

Once you have a base map made, you can start designating the basic “use”areas and “traffic flow” patterns that you have to work with. These basic uses and traffic flow patterns can help you create the “bones”of the design. This means that hardscape features such as retaining walls, steps, walks, patios, and docks are the building blocks that you want to use together to create a piece of art with your landscape composition.

Landscape Design is much more than just patios and plants. Good design will captivate the senses. It will be interesting and draw you in. Keeping in mind not only utility but aesthetics, your space can be your haven.

Make sure you draw out your landscape design to scale. A typical 24”x 36”plan will be drawn at 1”=8’. This way, measurements can be done and the job can get accurately priced. Unless you plan on having your entire property landscaped all at once, have the job get priced in sections. This way you will have a budget for the entire landscaping even if you only do a portion of it this year. Also, you will be assured that if you have an entire Landscape Design that you’re working from you will be working towards a complete composition instead of new ideas that don’t match up with what you already did.

Sometimes, you might find that as you’re doing your landscape design that you want to make changes to the plan. It’s much better to make changes in the design process than after the job already starts.

This is why doing a Landscape Design is so important.

It's like building a house without a plan. You wouldn’t think of doing that, and your outdoor environment deserves the same.