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Tips on Avoiding Costly Landscaping Mistakes

Landscape Design Services: Nashville, Brentwood, Franklin

Article Category: Landscaping
By Michael Aral

According to the US National Association of Realtors, attractive landscaping can increase the selling price of your home by 15 percent or more. Design your landscape right and you could get back twice your investment when you sell the house, whether you spend a few hundred or a few thousand. Unfortunately, the flip-side is also true: jump into your landscape project without a plan and you could spend a bundle only to end up with a landscape that looks worse than when you started. To make sure you get the best landscape you can, here are some tips to get you started.

Work with Your Climate

Garden magazines idealize the lush English cottage garden overflowing with deep green foliage and delicate flowers. What they don't tell you is not every garden can or needs to look like that. What works great in England could turn into a maintenance nightmare in southern California. The only thing you'll accomplish by trying to grow plants that just aren't meant for your climate is high bills and endless headaches. Not only that, you'll miss out on the benefits of a landscape designed especially for your house, such shade in the right times and places. It's fine to lift a few ideas from the magazines, but make sure you can adapt them to your part of the world.

Do Background Checks on Your Plants

You wouldn't let a stranger hang out in your garden, so why invite a plant you're not familiar with? After all, even ragweed can be beautiful in a catalogue picture. Save yourself some headaches and read up on each plant you plan to use. Investigate the plant's growth habits and characteristics such as whether or not it might aggravate allergies or attract pests.

Don't Forget That Plants Grow

Sounds obvious, but choosing too-large plants is a common landscaping mistake. While you're shopping around for plants and trees, always check what each one will look like at maturity. That dainty young willow could quickly take over half your hard, blocking out light from the other plants. Lilacs can grow fast enough to cover a window in just one season and full-grown wisteria becomes so heavy that it can tear down a weaker wall. If you're planting a vine, think ahead to whether or not you may want to remove it some day.

Be Patient with Your Trees

If you've just moved into a house with a bare landscape, it's only natural to want your garden now. When you're looking for trees to plant, it tempting to focus on growth rate and forget about the other aspects. While there are trees that can grow 10 feet a year (the empress tree, for instance), you don't really want them near your house. The problem is many trees with that kind of growth rate can turn into maintenance nightmares almost as fast, causing problems with invasiveness or breaking limbs. There are fast growing trees that won't cause problems, though, so do some research before you buy your trees.

Designing a beautiful landscape for your home doesn't have to take weeks of planning and tons of money. Just make sure you understand the basics and you'll be able to create a landscape that brings out the best in your home no matter what your budget.

Michael Aral offers 20 detailed tips for avoiding landscaping mistakes his new e-book. These easy-to-follow guidelines will not only save you money now, they'll save you from headaches and hassle in the future, too. If you'd like a free copy of How to Avoid 20 Landscaping Mistakes, just send an e-mail to backyardland@aweber.com. For even more landscape design tips, stop by Mike's site at http://www.backyard-landscaping-ideas.com

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