Sunday, October 30, 2011

The Importance and Benefits of Landscaping

Why Landscaping?

Landscaping is not only for the homes, but also for all places with green spaces. It does much than just to decorate our properties and to increase its value. Landscaping is an integral part of every culture. It plays an essential role in the grade of our environment. It has a hand in shaping our economy and our physical and psychological health. Landscaping is one of the most cost-effective tools for improving and sustaining the quality of life, whether in the city, the suburbs, or the country.

The Economic Importance of Landscaping

Landscaping can be applied by blending aesthetics with the pursuits of the economy.
Landscaping has lots to do with plants. Plants can increase tourism revenues. Tourists are willing to spend money visiting sceneries where greeneries and foliages are rich. Hotel and resort guests are willing to pay extra per nights for rooms overlooking jungle-like displays. Hotels, resorts and gardens with stylish gardens or parks tend to draw more visitors than establishments without anything green.

The horticulture and Landscaping business offer job opportunities, reason that gardeners and landscape artists are not out of work. Many residential and commercial premises are adopting the greenery, going for a park look, thus employing landscape artists to arrangement their gardens and gardeners to maintain them.

Business establishments with parks, gardens or any green place can see an increase in workers' productivity. Psychologists have found that plants and green spaces offer workers a sense of rest. Workers with more access to plants and nature tend to be more productive than workers who don't have access to plants. Moreover, the views of plants can increase job satisfaction. Employees with plants on the desks or even those with outside view of plants experience less job pressure and stress and greater job satisfaction than employees viewing man-made objects or having no outside view. Workers with greater views of plants report less headaches and other work-related illnesses too.

Landscaped establishments are unlikely to be vandalized. Landscaped areas are relatively graffiti-free while open, non-landscaped areas are easy targets for vandals.

How Landscaping Benefits to the Surroundings

Landscaping is a wonderful practice to appreciate nature. Landscaping is an art of taking care of the environment. It has many Benefits to the surroundings.

Plants protect water and air quality. Appropriate Landscaping reduces nitrite leaching from the soil into the water supply. Landscape plants, such as shrubs and turf, remove smoke, dust and other air pollutants.

Appropriate Landscaping also helps decrease soil erosion, mudslides, floods and dust storms. Plants and mulch hold soil in place, helping to keep sediments out of lakes, streams, storm drains and roads.

Landscaping can also contribute to the betterment of our natural resources. Trees can modify temperatures and protect against trees, thus reducing the use of fossil fuels.

Landscaping also help lessen noise pollution. A landscape of trees, turf grasses and shrubs absorb harsh sounds significantly better than pavement, gravel, bare ground and other hard surfaces.

Landscaping plays a large part in preserving our cultural heritage such as historical buildings, famous sites and landmarks, and other invaluable assets. In this way, Landscaping keeps a nation's spirit and soul intact.

How Landscaping Improves Lifestyles

Gardening is the healthiest and the excellent of all exercises, a great stress buster and a good way to spend time at home. Routine gardening tasks similar to mowing the lawn, weeding, raking, watering the plants and clipping the plants can measure up to the exertion rates of aerobics, jogging, cycling, push-ups and lifting weights. Want to lose weight or build muscles? Just do gardening.

Gardening has therapeutic effects for people affected by diseases and illnesses. Working with and around plants can improve level of life through psychological and physical changes. Garden helps restore the health of people who are injured, sick and stressed out, helping them to recuperate and regain their health and confidence. Some hospitals are building green spaces to aid their patients in that aspect.

Having a great landscaped garden in your residence can offer you privacy and peace of mind. Landscape plants screen out busy street noises and decrease glare from headlights. A landscaped garden is also a great spot for learning and meditation.

Finding Quality Landscaping Sydney Services

Landscaping services don't need to cost much, but finding a Landscaping Sydney service that can work around the vision of your ideal garden without compromises can be difficult. There are Landscaping companies that focus mostly on the aesthetics, but not on the essential groundwork such as irrigation, soil testing, bush fire prevention, and greenery maintenance. The initial thing you should look for in a Landscaping service is not the rates but the services it offers.

There are numerous ways to go about using a Landscaping Sydney service. You just have to know what's available for you.


By Unknown with 1 comment

Friday, October 28, 2011

Landscaping With Roses


Landscaping and the use of Roses is one way to add color and beauty to any yard. Part of the Landscaping plans should include Roses of some kind to blend in with you other Landscaping plants and flowers.

The long blooming Roses that are available today are very good to include with other Landscaping plants because of the longer lasting bloom and they are easy to maintain. The small, compact rose bushes make beautiful container plants and brighten up a walkway. A good ground cover is the low spreading rose. The tall variety of Roses can be planted three to four feet apart to form a border hedge and climbing Roses are good on fences or trellises.
You can hide the foundation of your house and at the same time add a little color by planting rose bushes completely around the house. If you plant them in a group of about five plants it can add texture and color to the area. You can also plant rose bushes to hide the problem areas of your yard. Just plant a few rose bushes or climbing Roses around your eyesores and in a few months they will have grown enough to produce beautiful flowers and to hide the problem.

Fences can be created by planting Roses. You can create privacy fences by using climbing Roses with trellises; a small circular fence using Roses is good for designating an area for reading or meditating. Dramatic effects can be attained by using combinations of yellow and red Roses together or even your pinks and dark blues. You can change to another atmosphere by using red Roses along with different shades of red in a different flower such as a geranium. Your choices are endless, it all depends on what mood you want to create.

Gardening for nature is probably the best way to create your Landscaping. You can have a wildlife habitat in your garden by planting Landscaping rose bushes. Roses provide shelter and food for many types of wildlife and the thorns on the bushes keeps away the predators. The rose hips keep the animals and birds fed during the winter months. If Roses are planted in a container on your patio or deck you can observe the wildlife even closer. It will not only attract the wildlife but will also liven up the patio with added color and fragrance.

You can also replace your annuals with rose buxhes. For all seasons, every year, a beautiful change would be a mass planting of bush Roses. So why go through the planting of impatiens, geraniums, and snapdragons every year? Choose the colors of Roses that can show off the perennials. If you have a white fence in the backyard you can plant shades of orange and yellow to liven it up. Some bright red Roses against a block wall or stone wall will make a lovely backdrop.

Companion plants such as blue cornflowers along with violet heliotrope will work nicely with yellow, pink, and white Roses. You can plant a rose bush tree in a container to place on the deck or patio. There is always room in any Landscaping for Roses such as bushes, trees, or climbers.


By Unknown with No comments

Monday, October 17, 2011

Landscape Garden Design – The Difference between a Good Garden and a Great One


A Garden can be a thing of beauty: provided a little care and attention goes into its creation. That's where Landscape Garden Designs come into play – the difference between creating a Garden in a considered fashion and just letting things grow. With a little forward thought and planning, any outside space can become a glorious addition to house or home.

The difference between a planned Garden, or a properly planned Garden, and a non planned Garden, is this: when you plan, you are able to give a natural effect much better than if you just throw things together and hope for the best. That's because a Garden is a defined space, usually bordered by a hedge or a fence. Nature is undefined, and so looks "right" when things just grow where they fall: a Garden, which is humanity's attempt at capturing nature in an easy to swallow format, only really looks correct if it has been planned in advance. Landscape Garden Design, which produces a sensible plan for every part of a Garden, so all its elements can be considered as a flowing whole, allow homeowners to reproduce nature in miniature without the end results appearing too haphazard or confusing.
Let's consider, for a moment, the natural world. The way it works and the appearances it presents – all of which we try to replicate in an intelligible way when we Design and plan Gardens. In the natural world, everything growing in a certain area "looks" right together. This is because all of those plants and Landscape features are correct for the place in question. Sand, stone and cacti for a desert, for example – deciduous trees, shrubs and low lying fern cover for woodland. The thing about Gardens, which is why we use Landscape Garden Designs to get them right, is that they try and draw in all sorts of plants and effects from various natural Landscape types and areas of the world. Without forward planning, throwing that little lot together is going to result in nothing more nor less than a big mess. Designing a Garden, with the help of professional Landscape Garden Designers (British run 4 Winds is a good example here), allows a homeowner to replicate the effects of disparate areas of the natural world without having the whole finished article look thrown together or peculiar.

Landscape Garden Designs allow one to use colour, seasonality and growth rate to create an ever changing, ever growing living picture. Because it has been Designed according to the in depth knowledge and experience of a professional, a Landscaped Garden looks just right during every season of the year – there's never too much or too little going on and everything, from the choice of plants to the size and shape of the lawn or patio areas. That means that one can choose one's favourite aspects of the natural world (which can be as exotic or as homely as one's own preferences) and reproduce them in a controlled way.


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Saturday, October 8, 2011

Collecting Wild Plants For the Landscape


When a gardener asks me how to collect Plants in the wild I'm apt to say "Don't do it."

This answer is not prompted by any view of conservation, but one of dollars and cents and labor.

Just figure it out for yourself. For one, or a few Plants you drive 20 rough miles into the mountains (40 miles round trip at.75 cents per mile). Then there is the problem of lugging tools and wet sacks a half mile to the location of the Plants. Then comes the digging of the plant or Plants (why do the "selected" ones always grow among rocks?) After the Plants are burlapped comes the time to carry them (35 pounds or more) back the half mile to the car. After a hurried trip home the Plants are planted and watered. Somehow they always look much more scraggly when they are out in the open. What is the result? A 50-30% chance that the scraggly plant or Plants will survive.
I don't like the odds.

As for me, I'll go to a good nursery and pay 10 to 15 dollars for a well-shaped plant growing on a pruned and active root system. It's already dug, so all I do is take it home and plant it. The odds? About 95 to 5 that it will never show that it has been moved.

For all usual cases that is still my answer.

Those Rare Plants

There are unusual cases where Collecting is worth the trouble, however. If you find a special plant, one with unusually large or colorful bloom, better foliage or something of the sort, it may be worthwhile to bring it into your garden for further observation.

The only catch is that of the chance of losing the plant in transplanting it. With rare Plants you just can't afford. 50-50 odds.

Here is a trick for juggling the odds in your favor.

When you have selected your plant, decide how large a ball of earth you should lift with it to give it a good chance of coming through if it has a good root system. Don't forget that a wild plant almost always has so wide ranging a system of roots that you can't hope to collect more than a small fraction of it.

Now draw a circle of the selected diameter around the plant. Mark the quadrants of the circle. Now dig a trench around two opposing quadrants. Make the sides straight down to the full depth of the future ball, cutting all roots cleanly.

The trench need be only as wide as the digging tool.

Now fill the trench with a light, fluffy mixture of compost ("forest duff") and a little soil.

If you do this in October or November you can then relax until Mareh: Then return and repeat the operation for the other two quadrants.

At the next planting season you can ball this plant, working from the outer edge of the trench. Your plant will have formed a multitude of fine feeding roots in the light back-fill in the trench.

Under such circumstances you should hardly lose a plant in a hundred.

Did I hear you say "That's hard work?"

It certainly is. I'm sure you will agree that it is too much for any ordinary plant.

Of course, if your plant is as unusual as you think it is, it's worth it. If not, be lazy like I am. Just let your nurseryman do the work. It's cheaper really, and it surely saves a lot of spade work.


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