The coast has many unique, historic homes and commercial structures that offer lots of charm and personality. Adding to their overall appeal are their gardens and landscaping features, often full of colorful flowers and blooming shrubs with pops of color and lovely aromas. If you’re looking to add a garden or new landscape design to your Sarasota or coastal home, you might note some vital tips for ensuring it’s always healthy and thriving.
Plant Tall Flowering Shrubs in Back
Create a nice backdrop for your coastal garden with taller, flowering shrubs you plant next to your fence or house. These will help break up the look of the home or a plain panel fence, and can also hide an unsightly chain-link fence as well!
Consider summersweet, which grows about five feet tall and very wide, or blue wild indigo, which grows about four feet tall. Swamp milkweed grows some three to four feet in height and orange coneflower grows about three feet tall, making them a perfect landscaping backdrop for smaller flowers in front or to provide separation between your lawn and house.
Note the Colors of Flowers
When planning your landscaping design in Sarasota or surrounding areas, note the color of flowers you can expect and ensure you mix these up accordingly. For example, you don’t want orange coneflower next to yarrow flowers as this might be too much yellow and orange together, and the flowers might simply blend in and disappear.
Instead, try yellow flowers with red or blue, or red and white varieties. You might have winterberry, with their strong red color, next to white foxglove in your landscape design. Light purple catmint also works well with the strong color of coneflower or the yellow of yarrow.
Add Hardscaping
Hardscaping refers to items in your landscape design that are not growing; for example, patio pavers, trellises, and decorative items like barrels and buckets are all hardscaping. Hardscaping breaks up the look of greens and flowers of your landscaping in Sarasota, FL and provides added texture.
To add hardscape features to your landscape design, work in terms of thirds; two thirds of your landscaping might be flowers and greens, and then another third compromised of patio pavers, brick edging, and decorative features. Hardscape features also work well in far corners or overly large areas of your property that get overwhelmed by greenery; an arch in a corner of your lot or decorative bucket on one side of your garden keeps all those greens and flowers from blending in with each and looking dull and drab.
Don’t Forget the Grass
Your landscaping is also offset by a healthy, lush lawn. If you struggle to grow grass on your property or there are lots of patchy brown spots, it’s probably time for sod installation. Fresh sod gives you a hearty green lawn in an instant, without waiting for seed to sprout.
Fresh sod installation also replaces grass that doesn’t thrive on the coast. Some grass species work well in warmer climates or when exposed to lots of sun, and these might not grow easily in Sarasota area neighborhoods! Consider sod installation along with your new landscape design so your entire property is beautiful and healthy.