How do I arrange my landscaping?

Calling it Landscaping seems to be a bit of a reduction in my personal opinion. There were so many elements to be considered when putting together the landscaping at my brand new home than I ever could have thought of. I started out with so much naively optimistic hope for the project and I ended with a lot of experience and a lot of metaphorical scrapes and bruises. There was a lot to think about because there were endless options.

Number one, I had to decide on if I wanted to do a mostly flat arrangement or create any raised rock or flower beds. I could go with flagstone rocks as a structural element, raising a flower bed above the soil level. I could also do regular flower beds with a couple small bushes and trees in them. I could build a raised flower bed out of bricks and make it so that it slowly evens out with the level of the ground in the rest of the yard. There are, of course, many options beyond that, but I decided to choose between those four categories. I could also arrange the overarching aesthetic structure of my landscaping using a variation of trees, bushes, and rocks. The biggest thing you want to consider when you’re making this decision is the design of your house itself. Ideally, you want a landscaping design that accompanies and compliments the architectural, and color style of your house. Personally, I decided on brick as the foundation of my bed aesthetic.

This blended and stood apart from my house in a really nice way because I was able to find bricks that sat slightly off the exact color of the bricks of my house making them not look out of place, but also not wash out against the backdrop of the house. It was important to me, since I was (for some reason) doing all the work myself, to make sure the landscaping was well thought-out and done with cohesion from start to finish – I know, much easier said than done. This was my goal as I continued on with this landscaping project after choosing to build the brick flower beds. My wife was a little disappointed we didn’t build our flower bed out of flagstone rocks, so I decided to compromise with her and get some beautiful big stones to place as decorations inside the raised, brick flower beds. This was actually highly complementary to the brick beds and ended up making the whole thing feel very grounded, southwestern, and almost adobe in aesthetic quality. I was very pleased and, more importantly, so was she.

Slowly, but surely the pieces came together nicely. After deciding on the “big rocks” as my toddler likes to call them, Next were the trees we were going to plant and this was my favorite part, for which I was the most excited out of all the deciding I had to do over the course of this local landscaping job. I looked for local lawn care companies in my area to get some help putting in the bigger trees and went ahead and had them plant the box shrubs while they were here because, knowing myself, I was not super keen on the idea of personally trying to make sure they were lined up and planted in a both aesthetically and organically pleasing way. Having the shrubs and trees planted in my yard and flower bed, it was time to decide on a couple things. First, Mulch. The main thing I was concerned about was color, but my wife made sure that I would be picking a kind of wood mulch that smelled good, so I made sure to tell the home improvement store employees that’s what I was looking for, to their unending delight. They pointed me to a nice plain cedar mulch. I almost went with the red to match my brick beds, but eventually decided against it.

Too much red might very well be a bad thing when designing anything, it seems. I used to think that if you matched the mulch you were getting for your flower beds to the materials used to create the beds themselves, it would help the overall aesthetic quality of the beds, but I was soon proven wrong. Cé La Viè. I decided on the light brown Cedar mulch. Mostly because, you guessed it, it smelled good. My wife seemed to be pleased so we purchased it and left, but not before checking out their flowers. The options they had were not bad, but we both decided it might be better to look at some more options for local flower planting that were not just the store we were in. This ended up being one of the best decisions we made during the entire project, to be honest. I was really glad we didn’t go with the first thing we saw. Looking for local lawn care companies that might have a better handle on the local flower game, I found one that helped get me set up with some really beautiful annuals to last the season and they did such a good job that I ended up just hiring that landscaping company to finish building my flower beds.

This was also a really great idea, let me tell you, but if I hadn’t found them, I probably would have just had to spread and distribute the mulch, myself, mostly by hand. This would have been a physically taxing process, so I was happy to pay someone to plant my flowers and install the mulch. After this, the only thing I had left to do for the beds was to water them religiously and make sure everything stayed healthy. I had some issues with a couple of the flowers I had planted, but mostly, everything was absolutely perfect. I’ve never really been happier with how a project turned out – I was genuinely surprised with how easy the whole thing ended up being at the end of it.