Whether you are looking to spruce up your backyard living space or completely renovate your entire landscape, good planning is essential to a successful project. Here are five factors to consider when planning out a landscape design in Babylon and Oyster Bay, NY.
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1. Know Your Needs and Priorities
You could start the process by taking the time to clarify exactly how you would like to use your landscape, how you want it to look, and what feelings you want your landscape to evoke in you.
Do you have kids and a dog who needs room to run? You might need a larger lawn space and more durable plantings. Are you an avid gardener who will nurture gorgeous flowers into spectacular shows of color? You may wish to replace part of the lawn with plant beds to create colorful displays throughout the landscape.
Do you want to focus on entertaining and enjoy a low-maintenance landscape? You may want to focus on expanded outdoor living space and less lawn. A great landscape is designed for the users. Knowing what you want will dictate the use of space, materials, and plantings that will bring your vision to life.
Before choosing amenities like an outdoor fireplace, wood-fired pizza oven, water feature, and so on, understand the overall feeling you want to have in the landscape; the features are just one way to achieve that feeling—but the feeling may not be all that different if you chose a fire pit over an outdoor fireplace. You may want to adopt the philosophy of feeling first, features second.
2. Know How Much Maintenance You Want to Do
Be realistic when it comes to landscape maintenance. If you want to spend more time nurturing a landscape, your design will likely include more greenery and a larger lawn; if you want to spend time entertaining and hanging out with family and friends, your design may include a larger patio space, a smaller lawn, and plantings that feature water-wise, hardy natives.
3. Traffic Flow
Good traffic flow means no one will be tripping over patio furniture, stepping through plant beds, or squeezing through awkward spaces to get to their destination. In general, a “hub” approach works well: The hub could be an outdoor kitchen, surrounded on one side by a dining area and the other side by a comfortable seating area. High-traffic, high-activity hubs could be located in the center, with low-traffic, low-activity “destination” areas positioned in outlying areas where they won’t get in the way.
4. Layers
A landscape with plants and hardscape features that are all the same height tends to be on the dull side. Consider a layered approach to plantings, and break up the flat plane of a patio and walkway with vertical elements such as an outdoor fireplace and seat walls. Such features can bring visual dimension to space.
5. Creature Comforts
You can get the most out of your outdoor living space with a permanent shelter structure and an outdoor fireplace. These could be the best investments in your landscape for ensuring that you will get to use your outdoor space for more than a few months each year.
