Backyard landscaping: Beauty as Close as Your Own Backyard
The backyard, for many homeowners, is an out-of-sight, out-of-mind proposition. If the neighbors and the front-yard passersby don’t see it, why bother too much with more than minimum backyard maintenance?
There are several reasons. Backyard landscaping will increase your property value, and can also give you added privacy. It may even make your home more energy efficient and environmentally functional.
Attractive, artistically–planned backyard landscaping will create a mood-calming effect, so that those who work from home will feel less stress. Backyard landscaping can provide a “sanctuary” for those who may be suffering from illnesses and unable to enjoy trips in the outdoors. The lift they experience from backyard landscaping may even hasten their recovery.
When deciding where to place trees, shrubs, architectural elements like walkways and gazebos, you can use backyard landscaping as a way to control the amount of sun exposure in your backyard and to cut down on noise, erosion, and the location of snow accumulation.
Besides making your home look better and benefiting your environment, backyard landscaping will actually lower your energy costs, even during summer and winter temperature extremes. How?
With proper planning, you can place both trees and shrubs in your backyard landscaping to provide your backyard and house with shade protection summer and wind protection in winter. And as plants “breathe” through their leaves, they inhale the air’s warmth, and cool the air with exhaled water vapor.
You may not have been aware that trees will also cut down on your home’s exposure to solar radiation and reflection, which is normally stored as heat in walls and concrete foundations.
In deciding what sort of trees to include in your backyard landscaping, remember that deciduous trees--which lose their leaves every fall--will not only offer your home cooling, energy-saving shade in the spring and summer; they will also allow warming sunlight to reach your home during the winter, after their leaves have dropped.
If you want to maximize your backyard landscaping’s energy-saving potential, you’ll need to give careful thought to the placement of each of its elements. Creating a backyard landscaping design which is both energy-efficient and beautiful will require some skill.
Your best option will be to talk to a landscaping professional, or, if you have the time and inclination, take some landscaping courses at your local community college. You may even find a landscaping workshop sponsored by a garden supply or home improvement store.
However you decide to beautify your home with backyard landscaping, you’re sure to find that the enjoyment, energy savings, cleaner air, extra quiet, and higher home value which result will more than make up for all the expense and hard work!