A guide for landscaping for curb appeal

It has been said that appearance is the most significant influence on first impressions, and first impressions matter. Curb appeal is the first impression of your home. Understanding how the curb appeal of your home influences the way people feel about your home gives you control to make the impact you want to make.

Some necessary steps and considerations can significantly influence your outcome when working on getting the best curb appeal. One significant influence on the appearance of your home is landscaping. As you continue reading, you'll learn some general areas to evaluate and steps to take regarding your landscape to send the message you want your home to convey.

First, it's essential to cover the basics. Is your landscape clean, neat, and healthy? An unkempt appearance can let down even the most refined landscape design or luscious plants. Start by cleaning up. Removing debris, dirt, and clutter is the first step in boosting the appearance of your landscape.

Once clean, focus on neatness. Just like most living things, plants need grooming to look their best. Mowing, edging, pruning, weeding, and dead-heading communicate care of the property and help the plants grow into themselves, appearing more robust. Neatness is typically best realized through a schedule and undertaken methodically.

As your property becomes clean and neat, work on addressing health concerns for your plants and trees. Sickly, dying, or dead plants are an eyesore and can grow into more concerning problems. Being able to illustrate that your property is healthy is important, and that is best achieved through confronting the health issues your plants are facing. In some cases, a homeowner can tackle these projects on their own. Still, it's not unusual to need the help of a professional. It's important to appreciate that tree removal is hazardous. Disease or fungal diagnosis and treatment often take specialized education and experience. Just as you would seek a doctor to help you when you're ill, plants and trees respond better to appropriate treatments prescribed and administered by experts in those sciences.

When you realize a clean, neat, and healthy landscape, you'll have made significant progress in curb appeal. Many homes give great impressions just by achieving these steps, but there's more you can consider if you want to impress.

Consider the balance of your landscape. Landscapes with significant hardscape features like stone walls or patios are well-served with a balance of softscape features like flowers, ornamental shrubs, and trees. Adding plants softens, which may be an otherwise stark appearance. Landscapes with lush plants reach another level with the introduction of hard features such as walls, water features, art, or fences.

Balance of color and texture is also important. Gardens and softscape spaces with just one plant species are commonly planted to show uniformity. Still, the effect becomes monotone and boring. Instead, choose plants that complement one another and plant them in ways that celebrate their differences. A good landscape designer or nursery can help you understand these concepts.

Scale is also an important consideration. Your landscape should complement your home and property. Homes with large exterior walls or significant open spaces are better served by plants and hardscapes of similar scale. In contrast, smaller homes and properties commonly look better with similarly scaled landscape features. Your landscape features should be large enough not to become lost in the scale of their surroundings while also not being so large as to overwhelm those surroundings.

Flow and movement are other characteristics of landscapes that boost curb appeal. While much of your landscape, such as walkways and walls, may have a utility, their form can add beauty instead of creating ridged straight edges, curves, and flow to the design. These designs can help your landscape complement the straight edges and uniformity in most home constructions. Even if you're using geometric shapes, staggering and offsetting joints can create movement, especially along the edges of the feature.

Finally, make decisions you enjoy. Yes, curb appeal can be important, but your landscape is a part of your home. You should first build an impression that appeals to you and makes you love how your home looks. Landscaping is a way of achieving that with significant varieties and methods for limitless customization. Take time to enjoy the process and learn what you like and dislike. Creating the landscape you love will convey the most important message: this is your home.

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Belknap Landscape is a full-service landscape firm that has been serving the Lakes Region since 1988. To learn more about Belknap go to belknaplandscape.com, call 603-528-2798, or email info@belknaplandscape.com.