Learn to design your own landscape

As homeowners with a desire for a beautiful lawn and gardens, the first thing DIY minded people like you and me find ourselves daydreaming about. Designing our own custom outdoor spaces, with our specific needs, likes, and dislikes our focus.

Our quandary, how to convert our hopes and dreams from thought into fully functioning reality we can enjoy. Without the need for spending a huge portion of our landscaping budget on a professional landscape designer and a contractor’s inflated labor costs

The solution, learn how to design our own landscape, lawn & gardens, roll up our sleeves, get our hands dirty, and spend our moneys on upgraded design features and materials.

In this article, we discuss things we will need to know to design the lawn and landscape designs filled with the features that will make our dreams a reality.

The best way to personalize your home is with your custom landscape design. Your lawn, gardens and their surroundings are the first things your friends and family notice.

Unique landscape design ideas, leave your friends, family and passers-by with a good lasting impression. Additionally, a well thought out landscape design will enhance your property’s value and functionality.

If you are like me, the first place we look for ideas for our landscape or garden designs is online. Many valuable resources help inspire our designs. Design tools created by qualified landscape architects, assist us in both the aesthetic and practical aspects of DIY landscape design.

Consider these 3 points of landscape design:

1. One of the basic aims of landscape design is to blend your home and outdoor objects – patio furniture, wood fences, and gardening equipment – into the natural beauty of the outdoors.
2. Many professional landscape architects achieve this effect by using monochromatic, analogous and complementary color schemes.
3. Online landscape design tools and landscape design software can help you identify what colors you could be designing around and give your ideas based on that color scheme.

Computer programs can also give you the ability to create a highly detailed plot design. Creating such a design is useful because, a plot is very difficult to visualize scale, form, and lines without actually sitting down and laying them out.

Once you draw an outline of the area, you want to landscape complete with all the existing elements. Such as trees, plants, elevation changes, and other structures i.e. garden storage shed, swimming pool etc. makes it easier to determine the overall function you want and need the area to provide, and how aesthetics can work to achieve that goal.

The availability or lack of light, and the effects of the filters that light travels through can help create the atmosphere you want in your backyard, landscape beds and gardens.

Think about this for a moment, how will you like to use your outside living space and when.

• If you enjoy large, shade trees in your yard, you may want to consider artificial lighting to illuminate your nighttime activities.
• Use LED floodlights focused on food and beverage entertainment areas.
• LED spotlights draw attention to architectural design elements / features.

Your backyard may not be visible to your neighbors or people passing by on the street, but your family will most likely, be spending a lot of their outdoor time there.

Take into consideration what kinds of activities your family will want to do in your backyard, and then design around that set of activities.

• Do they want to have a vegetable or flower garden?
• Do you host cookouts for the girls’ softball team or Boy Scout troop during the summer?
• Do you have or want a swimming pool?

Make sure your backyard has enough privacy with trees, shrubs, or wood privacy fences. Consider alternatives to grass – mulch and stone both serve different purposes and can help you create a unique and creative backyard landscape design.

Enjoy your backyard landscape you Designed Yourself. Mike

The author of this publication, Mike Teddleton owns the copyright to Learn to design your own landscape to publish this article in print or online can only be granted by contacting me the author in writing. You may use the intro and link back to the article directing the reader back to my post here at HubPages where they may find the story in its entirety.