Creating depth in your landscape

Creating depth in your landscape

Creating depth in your landscaping is appealing to the eye.  Making sure to also create ease of maintenance to your landscaping with ease your workload.

Upon purchasing our home a number of years ago, we were faced with the daunting task of cleaning up our back yard.  It had a nice large deck off the back door with steps down to grass of sorts, mainly weeds, in two different directions.  The grass area that had full sun needed a lot of TLC and it was extremely boring to look at.  

Make a Plan - Walkways, Patios, and Flowerbeds.

We decided to create a walkway from the front of the house to the back with brick pavers placed in a herringbone pattern.  It leads to a small paver area for the garbage, recycling, and yard waste cans so we would not have to move the cans for every mowing of the lawn.  We set up a 3-foot wide flowerbed with bricks to edge it.  The flowerbeds parallel the house except where the fireplace sticks out.  At the fireplace, we bumped out the bed in a curved semicircle allowing for larger a larger planting area all edged with bricks.  These bricks help ease the maintenance workload wither you mow or let someone else do it for you.  When mowing the back lawn the mower can go over the brick and keep the grass out of the flowerbeds and the mower can keep the “flowers” out of the grass. 

 

Know your soil!

Then we continued the flowerbeds around the deck.  As the ground around the deck stared to drop away from the deck, we decided to build up the beds with wall bricks to create a deeper planting area.  This also helped the soil as we have a lot of clay in our area.  Plants do not grow well through this layer.  We added good top soil, steer manure, and peat moss to help our soil. We also built up a flowerbed around a large maple tree for more planting areas.

Planting for seasonal color and varying height and depth.

 Once the beds were in place and soil additives were added the flowerbeds were ready to be planted.  We wanted to have a variety of plants that had seasonal color and different depth and heights.  We planted plants that like shade in the areas of the flowerbeds that get very little sun due to being in the shadow of the house and deck.  We made sure the plants that we planted would grow in our area.  

Adding Plants as you go.

It is an ongoing process to find what works well for our beds.  Each year we try to add something to the beds.  Two years ago, we added spring bulbs that were on sale at the store.  They were in bloom so we could see what the height and size of the plant would be and how it would look with the rest of the plants.  We moved some plants that did not do as well as we thought they could.  We added colorful pots the the deck with some of the same plants in the flowerbeds.  Planting might be your thing or letting someone else plant for you.  Having a beautiful back yard is a joy.