Welcome to My World: Creating an Entry Garden
Most people underestimate the value and effect a great front yard can produce. It is the first impression visitors gather about who you are and how you live. It can make a strong positive statement to prospective homebuyers as well.
Consider how a guest gets to your front door from where they park and what they see on their journey up to the door. Is there color to welcome and brighten their journey, and are they in a comfortable space while waiting at your door? What do they see as they wait for you to answer the door? Do they face your garage? If you answered yes to any of these questions, it's time to reevaluate your front yard.
Guests need to see your front door clearly to avoid confusion about where they are to go. The front walk should easily lead them from where they park to the door, and it’s best if the walk is made of stable, non-shifting material. This hardscape element should compliment the architectural elements on your house, and colors should fall in same tones.
Create color areas for a welcoming effect. Make sure not to overdo plantings that require lots of maintenance as this causes you to spend time in the front of your house on your hands and knees. Use textured plantings such as ornamental grasses, and/or flowering shrubs that can be colorful yet low maintenance.
Keep your entry clean, comfortable, and open. Dark and claustrophobic entry areas feel unwelcoming. Light the way at night but don't use 'run-way' lighting schemes (see article on landscape lighting). Create an impression that speaks volumes about your uniqueness and how pleased you are to welcome visitors, and not the imitation of every other home on the block.
Twelve Steps to a Great Landscape
If you want to have the best garden and landscape on the block, follow the steps landscape professionals use to get started:
Step 1: Know thyself. Discover what you want and need by doing some research. Make note of landscapes that appeal to and inspire you and keep notes about them in a file or on a poster board. Make sure to learn what products and services cost in order to establish a realistic budget.
Step 2: Idea gathering. Keep organized files of those elements you want in your garden, complete with pictures and drawings. Photos of patios, outdoor furniture, water and fire features, recreation equipment, or that really fabulous light fixture you can envision lighting up the patio at night are all helpful when working to pull together a beautiful landscape.
Step 3: Develop a master plan. This is your ‘business plan’ for the yard. Work with a professional to establish a strong space design, and then layer that with lighting, plants, pathways, flower and herb gardens, and fire and water features.
Step 4: Use clever innovations. Creatively hide an unsightly shed by using a metal trellis with flowering vines, turn an old stump into a garden table or cover it up with beautiful native grasses. Try using a concrete color stain to give new life to an old patio, or install a new pavers walkway with gently curving lines that are meant to lead the eye to the front door.
Step 5: Mass effect. Use multiples of one variety of plant, and introduce bold color into your outdoor areas in the form of colorful container plantings and furniture cushions. Strike a bold accent by considering a strong garden feature such as a sitting wall.
Step 6: Simple details. Create elegance, serenity, and peacefulness with subdued, restful effects. Use green on green color and texture. Try to repeat patterns of movement and materials for consistency and calm.
Step 7: Keep proportion in mind when layering elements into the garden. A good planting scheme should look just as good in a black and white photo as it does in color. Let that idea guide you.
Step 8: Create a sense of space. Connect your garden to the surrounding environment by incorporating similar architectural elements and color; consider regional influences (i.e. natural prairie or mountains), and use locally and readily available resources such as mountain granite and moss rock, flagstone, ornamental grasses, and flowing streambeds.
Step 9: Create 'outdoor' rooms. Think in terms of ceiling, floors, and walls to pull together a sense of rooms in the outdoors.
Step 10: Use old ideas in new and different ways. Combine a bold color such as the chartreuse-hued sweet potato vine with white impatiens in a colorful orange or blue glazed ceramic urn to brighten up a shady area of the yard. Or place a birdbath in the sun surrounded by succulents, sedums, and New Zealand flax.
Step 11: Think outside of the box. Consider creating a patio and sitting area in your front yard to create a courtyard entry feel. Use a space that you wouldn't normally to enhance a welcoming feeling. Plant vines on either side of garage, or cantilever trellis beams out from header boards above the garage door, and let vines grow to meet over the garage.
Step 12: Remember that gardens are to be used. Design for living in your yard. Create comfort, security, privacy, intrigue, interest, and fun.
Beyond
the runway lights of old....
Landscape
lighting today offers wonderful opportunities to express your inner Picasso and
create an outdoor space that feels like a room extension of your house. Some of
the following tips will 'light ' the way for you.
Don’t follow the look they display
on the outside of the box, because it is for showing the fixture, not designing
a great lighting plan. Try to avoid path lights on either side of a walkway or
driveway that give you a runway effect. Place lights carefully to both light
the way for safety and to play up the texture of, say, a moss rock or
ornamental grass.
Try to think in terms of all the jobs that light performs
when planning out your landscape lighting.
Planning is the operative word here.
Make a list of spaces you would like lit up at night to create safety or
ambiance. Do you want to light up a tree to create branching shadows at night,
and also draw attention away from a front study window? Lighting can light a
path, silhouette branches or an architectural element like a wall or water
element, or it can light over head by hanging fixtures in a tree, or off a
patio structure such as a chandelier might.
Lighting the garden at night brings
out the beauty and mystery of the space that you wouldn't otherwise see.
Lighting can illuminate the best features, while distracting the eye from less
desirable features. It can create a mood and shape the views. It can make a
space seem larger, or an open expanse more intimate.
There are many choices for outdoor lighting on the market today. You can go solar and green, you can use low-voltage lights on sensors for daylight or movement, you can light with halogen where a brighter spotlight is needed, and you can do seasonal lighting with fiber optic color. There is a new line of lights developed for reducing light pollution at night (Dark Sky) and still provide post lights where needed to light the way. Landscape lighting is fun to work with and can create great effects just like artwork.
From the Archives:
Landscapes Go ‘Green’
Feng Shui in the Landscape and Garden
Hydrangeas
Tackle Lawn Brown Spots
Beat The Heat
Less Lawn, More drought-tolerant Plants
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