Backyard Design

If you own a home with a backyard in dire need of a complete makeover, where do you begin looking for a design for the perfect backyard?

You can search the Internet for design ideas for a perfect backyard and uncover scores of informative articles as well as pictures and diagrams.  You'll get advice on plantings, patios, decks, vegetable and flower gardening, and outdoor storage and furniture of all kinds.

A trip to the public library or a quality bookstore will yield a treasure trove of information in landscaping books and magazines.  You could talk to a few professional landscape designers and visit some of their completed projects.  But ultimately, the best source for the perfect backyard design is you.

The truth is "perfect" is a relative term, and what is perfect for your neighbor might be all wrong for you.  Your neighbor loves plants and has the time and talent to invest in their maintenance.  When it comes to flowers, trees and shrubs, you can take them or leave them and you prefer to get your vegetables from a local produce market. The thought of spending your valuable free time on your hands and knees pulling weeds is totally abhorrent to you.  Simply put, you first have to sit down and spell out how you want to use your backyard and what kind of materials you'll need to get the result you want.

If you like to have a few friends over for a backyard barbecue the perfect design for you must include outdoor cooking and serving areas.  If you like plants and flowers but don't want to spend an inordinate amount of time tending to them, your design must include low maintenance plantings.

As an example, suppose you like colorful flowers that stay colorful for months at a time.  An avid gardener knows that some plants require "deadheading" to prolong the blooming period.  Some blooms contain seed pods and once the bloom dies off the plant is ready to go to seed, which simply means the seeds will eventually fall to the ground to reproduce new plants.  To trick the plants into pumping out new blooms, gardeners remove dead blooms before the plant goes to seed.  There are many plants that have fairly long blooming periods that don't require deadheading and these are the ones you want for your low maintenance perfect backyard design.

You can apply the same low maintenance standard to the lawn areas of your perfect backyard.  Some varieties of lawn grasses are designed to be more sustainable.  First, their growth is slower, requiring less frequent cutting.  Second, they are drought resistant, requiring less frequent watering during dry spells.

Finally, although your backyard design must be perfected to match your personal needs, you have to remember that at some point in time someone else will inherit that backyard.  Some design decisions are virtually irreversible and can impact the future resale value of your property.  While you may have no immediate plans to sell, conditions like job promotion can come up which will change the picture.

While pouring a solid concrete patio may be the lowest maintenance option that will make you happy, removing that patio will be a major endeavor for the next owner.  Instead, use paving blocks or stones, which can be more easily moved if the new owner wants the patio in a different area.  

If you want minimal or no plantings, don't remove existing vegetation from flower and vegetable beds and then poison the soil with weed killer.  Instead, apply a weed preventive compound and then mulch over the beds so they can be put back into use for vegetation if need be.  Good luck creating your perfect backyard design!