Trends In Landscape Design: Great Ideas and Must Haves for Your Yard
We’ve been watching the landscape trends and have some ideas to help you build the yard of your dreams. Lives are busy, and your yard should provide a sanctuary so we’re seeing more automation, easy-care, and an overall simplification of gardens and hardscapes. Who has the time to put into creating and maintaining a formal English garden anymore?
We’re also seeing a move to plant for the planet whether that be food for humans or bees, trees for carbon dioxide absorption, or just less grass to minimize irrigation needs. Converting lawns to low maintenance gardens, and providing plants with a purpose is a trend.
With so many options, we thought we’d provide a few of our favorite suggestions that we are happy to help you with.
Automation
It seems everything in our homes can now be controlled with either a tap of a phone or a call to Alexa, so why would our landscape need to be any different? Automation has found its way into our yards and for that, we are thankful.
- Lighting: We know lighting plays an essential part in a landscape, not just for safety, but to add to the ambiance. The FX Luminaire’s Luxor ZD system is one we recommend. It’s a single system controlled by a phone app that can turn on and off, dim or intensify, and even set time zones across your landscape for all your lighting. Discover ways to light up your landscape here.
- Irrigation: Similarly, we love the SMART Irrigation Controller that automatically adjusts water needs based on environmental conditions. It collects information about weather conditions and adjusts so your sprinklers aren’t on during a rainstorm. Check out this blog for more irrigation tips.
Contact us to find out more about this new technology and how we can help introduce it into your landscape.
Edible Gardens
Vegetables are the top choice for those wanting to add gardens for food, but berries, herbs, fruit, and even edible flowers are all possibilities. What you plant really comes down to your palette. There are some challenges to growing food such as avoiding the use of chemicals to control insects and disease, efficient irrigation, keeping critters from eating your bounty, and of course finding time to plant, maintain, and harvest. But tasting that first sun-kissed tomato straight from the vine will make the effort worthwhile.
We can help you create ideal garden beds that work with your overall landscape and even help you identify what will grow best in your yard, how to keep pests away, proper mulching and crop rotation methods, and just how much water is really needed. To help you get started, check out this post on edible gardens.
Yards Approved By Nature
The Pacific Northwest gets inundated with rain all winter and then skirts drought each summer. That makes water conservation a critical component of a landscape. We offer rain gardens, stormwater storage, and re-use systems, weather-based irrigation control, recycled water reuse, and rain sensors. And going beyond water conservation, our teams are happy to choose pesticide-free products, organic fertilizers, and we’ll even hand weed to minimize the impact on neighboring plants.
Easy Care Landscape Materials
Gone are the days when neighborhoods hummed each weekend with the sound of lawn mowers and blowers. With soccer, summer camps, a thirst for outdoor adventure, and family time, weekends are no longer for yard care. That means beautiful landscapes are becoming more easy-care. Where lawns once ruled, now you’ll find varieties of low maintenance ground cover or permeable surfaces. Plant selection has also gone to a more native flair as growing in their natural habitat makes plants easier to care for. All of this can add interest and exceptional design to replace what previously might have been a square patch of green.
Special Features
Yards more than ever have become personal oases for relaxing, playing, and entertaining. There are many features you can incorporate to make it your place to escape. Adding a water feature for soothing sounds, a firepit for evenings spent stargazing, sound systems and outdoor grilling centers for fun days with friends, can turn outside into the favorite “room” of your home. Be sure to look through our photo gallery for design ideas. Our team has completed beautiful spaces.
No matter what type of landscape design you choose, even if you do still prefer a formal English garden, it takes time, energy, and some skill to get it to your ideal. Our landscaping services can take the work out of it for you from the start by helping you put together a plan, install your ideal landscape and garden, and then mulch, prune and maintain that yard to perfection. All you’ll need to do is contact us and then bask in the glow of a fire pit, listen to the subtle sound of a splashing fountain, and breathe in the sweet scents of the flowers.
