Whether your garden design is formal, with obvious routes, or is more open and informal, directing people so that they don’t trample all over your garden can be desirable. Lawns remain ever popular for both front and rear gardens, so constructing a pathway that either leads up to your front door, or one that runs from the rear of your home to the bottom of your garden, is a good idea.

Lawns And Paths.

A pathway will direct visitors in the direction you want them to walk and offer protection to more delicate areas. No one likes to see a muddy track that has been caused by people taking the same route up and down a lawn. Constructing a pathway that is durable and will protect the lawn is one thing, but making it a feature of the garden whilst adding a certain amount of style is another. Don’t be tempted to go for a quick an easy pour of concrete to make a pathway, but plan the route with some artistry in mind.

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If you live by a river then designing your garden so that you make the most of it is probably high on your list of priorities. Oftentimes, the presence of a body of water nearby will be why you first fell in love with a property in the first place. Rivers create a sense of connection to other places in a garden environment because they flow from here to there and because they open up the vista. Whether you have a riverside property, or own one that sits next to a lake, make the water the focal point of your garden design.

Orientation.

If you have a plot of land next to a river and plan to self build your home, orientate it towards the river. Of course, if your home already occupies a plot away from the river, there is little you can do without starting again. If so, consider an extension that will make the most of the water front, or an out building that you can use in the summer to while away the longer evenings next to the course.

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If your home occupies a plot with an incline, the idea of putting together a fantastic looking garden may seem like an uphill struggle. Hillsides present different challenges to neat and flat garden spaces. Nevertheless, hilly gardens can offer a great deal of potential, so long as you work with what nature has given you. Moreover, planting that is sympathetic with a hillside location can really make your garden’s design stand out.

Don’t be put off a stunning, even contemporary, design because the landscape seems limiting at first. In fact, it is by working within the constraints of a hillside exterior that you are likely to come up with something new. Each garden is different, but the nature of your hillside will make your landscape design, however you choose to implement it, unique.

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With the onset of mass car ownership in the last century, so dwellings’ carriage houses tended to be converted to garages, providing autos protection from the elements. Reliable vehicular transport relied, to some extent, on the cover afforded by a domestic garage. However, as car design has improved so the need to park a vehicle inside has lessened.

Nevertheless, more and more new homes are built with double garages or even ones large enough to comfortably house three vehicles. Whether you use your garage to store your car or motorcycle or not, having one that fits in with your home’s exterior is likely to be a design consideration for most homeowners. Even if you use your garage just as a store room, as many people do, don’t overlook the aesthetic appearance of your garage when it comes to the exterior design of your property.

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During the winter you can be forgiven for thinking that gardens don’t offer much interest and that, with daylight hours at a minimum, there is little point spending time on garden design until spring arrives and you can get planting in earnest. One of the best ways to keep your garden looking vibrant in winter is to have plenty of evergreen planting that adds both structure and color to your garden. When the rest of the garden is not in flower, evergreens really come into their own.

Pines.

If you are thinking about adding some evergreen plants for next winter, the time to start thinking about it is now. If you need to rearrange your garden layout to accommodate them, then you’ll want to conduct any ground works sooner rather than later. Once completed, you’ll be ready to plant immediately that the weather improves and the new plants can take full advanatge of the springtime growing season. Most evergreens are hardy, but with newly planted ones they will still want to avoid hard frosts.

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For the landscape designer, there are some truly beautiful climbing plants to choose from that can be trained up trees, trellises or even suspended from hanging pots. Using climbing plants that extend a traditional border’s height will add structure to a garden design. However, for most of us the sight of a climbing plant, in a domestic setting, is most associated with one growing up the wall of the exterior. Indeed, an established ivy or a clematis, for instance, becomes the wall, in a visual sense.

If your home has broad expanses of wall that you find dull to look at, one of the best things you can do to add interest is to grow a climbing plant. Grow your climbing plants around window frames, doorways and garages. Annual and perennial climbing plants both do well if grown in containers, so you don’t need to worry about invasive roots causing a problem with your building’s structure. Even if you don’t want a climbing plant against your main building, planting one so that it gives a new look to a trellis or a boundary fence is an equally good idea.

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Brilliant white marble exteriors of buildings go as far back as the ancient Greek civilization and they really took off in Roman times. For public buildings a white façade echoes the ancients’ design aesthetics and you will still see it used regularly in modern architecture. However, dwellings are a different matter. Whereas the exterior of The White House is designed to evoke classical architecture with shimmering columns, a regular white home’s façade is more likely to take its design cues from Scandinavian design or Bauhaus.

Weatherboarding.

Whitewashing your home means that you can have confidence that it will work visually. Indeed, a completely monotone façade rarely works unless it is white. Nowadays, you will not often see great expanses of marble on view, but painted stucco, brickwork and woodwork are common enough. And they remain a design classic.

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