-The best in outdoor living…right outside your backdoor.
-Herb Gardens, Play yards or Swimming Pools and Sports courts from simple to complex, you’ll find it here.
-Special Outdoor Amenities section offers designs for useful outdoor structures.
-Complete design drawings available separately.
The Backyard Landscaper: 40 Professional Designs for Do-It-Yourselfers
John Ward has traveled extensively throughout the United States, exploring the country’s national parks, forests, and wilderness, particularly in the West. Inspired by Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams and their vision of the American landscape, Ward began taking pictures in Rocky Mountain National Park. The resulting body of work, spanning three decades, is considered to be amongst the most striking in the field. This is the first major collection of master photographer John Ward’s gorgeously detailed black-and-white images of the American West. Working exclusively with large-format view cameras, Ward is revered for his technical skills, strong compositional sense, fine detail, and the exceptional quality of his master prints. Ranging in scale from tree bark to the vast emptiness of the desert southwest, the 60 meticulously reproduced black and white duotone photographs in Land and Light in the American West highlight these qualities, providing a visual integration of landscape and ruin, transcendence, and decay, that speak to the powerful forces of nature and culture at work in the West.
Backyard landscaping ideas are legion, and can be used to transform a common old block of land into something quite marvelous. Just about any backyard can be transformed to a higher level with the right ideas and the right amount of effort, let us not forget: attitude, imagination, and creativity, will go a long way in assisting, too. Given a short amount of time, you will be able to make something beautiful out of your ordinary backyard block of land.One of the most effective methods of achieving this, is with the use of plants for landscaping.
Filling a garden with plants can help transform any backyard into lively place of beauty. Over time, the plants that you have chosen for your backyard landscape, will give the place its own personality, as they grow and spread their branches.If you wish to give your home that stately old english look, some largish evergreen trees will give that noble look that you mostly see in elegant mansions and homes. The same elegance can be implied with the addition of large evergreens in your backyard.
Color is important in any backyard, and the addition of flowering plants here and there will add contrast . Roses lined along a path-way always makes for a pleasant if not grand stroll. A garden bed, specifically for roses, gives a magnificent confetti effect, full of life – with the added bonus of cut-flowers for the house, and gloriously heady perfume all around. If you are wanting color in your garden, but don’t have the spare time required to care for garden beds regularly, you could always create a wildflower garden. Wildflower gardens require little maintenance in order to succeed, and give your backyard a bit of a rustic look, that you may prefer over mown lawns, wickedly sharpe edges, and seemingly sterile backyard landscapes.
Filling your backyard with plants certainly solves the problem of spending part of your precious weekend trying to mow large expanses of lawn, by reducing the lawn area that you need to mow. A vegetable garden acheives much the same result. Another way to reduce some mowing area in your backyard is the application of “hardscapes”. Hardscape, refers to all those additions to your landscape, that are not actually growing – like decks, paths, patios, etc. This is another landscaping idea that you can incorporate, with the use of plants or trees, to make your backyard even more interesting – if not practical. You could have a rock-garden, fences or walls, possibly a fish-pond or fountain, a pergola or deck perhaps, to create alternative elements of beauty in your backyard.The use of hardscapes, to the exclusion of everything else, is not only unattractive, it is also cheating.
Not only is it pretty lazy, but also, you are cheating your family, and indeed yourself, out of the beauty and serenity, that only a planted garden can afford. Try not to overdo the big bits.So, really, your imagination and willingness for “some” work, are the only things preventing you from implimenting some backyard landscaping ideas.
