Landscaping Ideas for Front of House

Landscaping ideas for front of house represent your home to your community and to potential buyers. Landscaping often determines your first impression of a house, presenting the homeowner's preferences and tastes to the public. As you think about ideas for the front of your house, look for elements and themes that complement the exterior of your home and convey a sense of your personal style.

Landscaping ideas can be simple or complex, depending on how ambitious you are and how much you want to invest in foliage plants, shrubs, ground cover, terraced rock, gravel and other elements. While some homeowners prefer a natural, low maintenance landscape, others enjoy more formal, structured ideas. If you like to spend time outdoors improving the appearance of your property, maintaining hedges, sculpted trees and flower beds may seem more like recreation than a chore.

Balancing Your Landscaping

The front of your dwelling is the view of your residence that greets you every day. Having a yard that's unbalanced, too cluttered or too barren can affect the way you feel about your dwelling. When you're planning landscaping ideas for front of house, think about how you can balance plants and structural elements with the house itself to create a more harmonious design.

If the building itself has rough edges or unattractive features, landscaping ideas for front of house can include shrubs, ornamental trees, ground cover or perennial flowers to mask or soften harsh details. Beds of colorful phlox or impatiens draw the eye away from architectural details of the home that you don't want observers to notice right away. Perennials and annuals can fill in empty spaces with color and beauty. Choose low maintenance plants that will flourish in your climate.

Take pictures of the front of your house and backyard before you make any changes, then compare these photos to landscaping pictures from magazines or websites that correspond to the way you'd like your home to look. Your pictures act as a visual guide to plot the elements of your landscaping ideas, including plants, terraces, boulders and pathways. Study your residence from a practical standpoint to see if your driveways and the entries to your home are clearly defined and accessible to visitors and family.

Landscaping ideas for front of house should include an evaluation of your yard's structural elements. Are fences and terraces well maintained? Are attractive boulders, fountains or stone accents overgrown with vines or cluttered with dead leaves? Sometimes a little maintenance is all that's required to inspire more creative landscaping ideas for front of house. Broken or decaying trellises, wooden fences and arbors can pose a hazard to children or guests and should be repaired or removed.

Low Maintenance Front Yards

For busy parents and professionals who don't have a lot of time to spend caring for lawns or flowers, landscaping ideas for front of house may emphasize low maintenance elements. A large lawn can require a lot of work, especially in a climate that experiences extremes of temperature or long periods of drought. Lawns can be partitioned with fencing to create areas covered by ornamental rocks, low maintenance ground cover and shrubs. Let the grassy areas add a natural look to your landscape, but don't let them get too weedy.

Landscaping ideas for front of house in dry, desert climates can create a sense of serenity and simplicity with very little maintenance. The cacti, ornamental grasses and succulents that thrive in these climates have evolved by surviving with very little water, so these dry climate landscapes -- or xeriscapes -- demand very little watering or sprinkler time. With a few carefully chosen plants and other elements, you can easily implement landscaping ideas for front of house with a Southwestern theme in either a dry or humid climate.

A winding trail of gravel or lava leading up to the front of your house adds an intriguing focal point to your landscaping ideas. Line the trail with succulent border plants or cacti, with desert sage or ornamental lavender accents. Sandstone boulders, driftwood logs and colorful stones add a variety of textures and colors to your landscaping ideas. Create a Southwestern desert theme in the front of your house with yucca, agave, prickly pear and other native desert plants.

Eye Catching Walkways

Make your home more accessible to friends and neighbors by planning walkways that lead from the street to your porch, or by marking existing trails more clearly. Explore different textures and colors of stones, including patterned bricks, slate pavers or lava rock that will draw friends to your dwelling. Line trails with larger rocks or colorful annual flowers that can easily be replaced each year. Use your landscaping ideas for front of house to guide your friends to your door and make your dwelling more attractive to the whole neighborhood.

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