Creating a Successful Hardscape

Hardscaping is an attractive feature to add to your yard, and it offers many different appealing options. You can do anything from a rustic stacked wall to a fully developed outdoor living room and kitchen! Once you have decided to create an outdoor space, you must plan carefully to meet your hardscaping goals.

Research will really pay off, especially when you consider that a fixed object in the landscape is not going to move easily, and you don’t want to put in a lot of effort just to have your design fail. Follow these simple tips and avoid some common mistakes, and create a hardscape you’ll love for years to come.

Consider the landscaping

As much as you can, consider the entire area available to you for hardscaping before you design an element, even if you’re just starting with one space. At a minimum, you should plan a design for the whole area, or consult a professional to design for you. If you don’t consider the site as a whole, you may end up with a finished product much like building one room of a house. A professional landscaper in Las Vegas will know to consider the big picture.

Delve into the drainage issues

Many hardscapes have been messed up by people ignoring drainage requirements. You must plan how the drainage will be affected when you place a wall or a patio. There is also an environmental consideration which may include planning runoff so you can capture water and use it on site, instead of letting it hit concrete and go down a drainage pipe.

Create a focal point

You want your eye to travel toward a destination, and one or two visual elements that make you pause either literally or visually, like a weeping evergreen with an Oriental lantern.

Choose balanced elements

Boulders are actually meant to help neutralize an area, but have often been dropped right on top of the ground and are sitting like dinosaur eggs. To use boulders in a landscape successfully, you need to make sure they are large enough to fit within the scale of the landscape, and bury them deep enough so they look like a naturally-occurring element. Too-linear elements can create the same unnatural feel.

Keep the greenery

All-stone or concrete areas may be popular in the Southwest, but there the focus on hardscapes is a necessity, not a trend. They sometimes must have this due to strong sunlight and too little water. Everyone else should include ample vegetation in conjunction with hard surfaces.

Doing each of these things will help ensure that your landscape looks as beautiful as possible. If you do this, you will find that your landscape is not only gorgeous, but it has a lot of different dimensions that surprisingly all work together to create a beautiful whole. If you do this, you will love your landscaping for years to come!

For more hardscaping tips, come back tomorrow, or click here.