Gardens & Landscaping | Southern Shores

Plant Smart: The Art of Selecting the Perfect Plants for Your Landscape Design

Date March 10, 2024 Category Gardens & Landscaping

Creating a landscape that mesmerizes and thrives is akin to painting a masterpiece. The key lies in choosing the right plants – a decision that intertwines aesthetics, environment, and functionality. Let’s delve into the art of selecting the perfect plants for your landscape design, transforming your garden into a living work of art.

Understand Your Landscape’s Microclimate

Every garden has its unique microclimate, influenced by factors like sunlight, wind, and soil type.

Tips:

Sunlight Analysis: Observe how sunlight moves across your property.
Soil Testing: Understanding your soil type helps in selecting plants that will thrive.

Aesthetic Alignment: Choosing Plants that Complement Your Home

The best landscapes create a harmonious balance between the house and the garden. This synergy is achieved by choosing plants that complement the architectural style of your home.

Considerations:

Color Coordination: Select plants whose colors enhance the hues of your home.
Architectural Symmetry: Choose plant shapes and sizes that complement your home’s architectural features.

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7 Feel-Good Reasons For Investing In A Landscaping Design

Date January 5, 2022 Category Gardens & Landscaping

Please speak to any professional about mental well-being and one of the many ways they advise how to promote it is to do as many things as possible that make you feel good. Anything that puts you in a positive frame of mind is good for you, and although it may not be the first thing that springs to mind with the right lawn care and landscaping design, a garden is something that can produce lots of positivity.

If you’re not sure how a freshly landscaped garden will make you feel good, keep reading. The landscaping professionals from Perth Landscapes have highlighted seven ways a newly landscaped garden will make you feel good. By investing in a landscaping design, you can transform your garden into a welcoming space for you and your family.

You Create A Garden That Functions All-Year-Round: The more you can be out in the fresh air and surrounded by nature, the better it is for you. This can be achieved by transforming your garden so that it functions all year. By providing shade, it means your garden is ideal for the hot summer months, whilst using trees and fences for protection from winds; for example, you make it suitable for use in winter too.

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7 Reasons To Hire A Landscape Architect

Date December 22, 2021 Category Gardens & Landscaping

Have you been considering hiring a landscape architect? These professionals are experts in turning bland ordinary outdoor spaces, including gardens, into visually stunning, practical, and highly desirable areas. Not only do they greatly enhance the appearance of the areas surrounding property, but they can also add value to them as well.

That last point might seem like reason enough to hire a landscape architect and a professional landscaper, however, there are many more. Here are 7 seven reasons why employing a landscape architect is the right move.

You Want A Landscape Design That Compliments The Architecture Of Your Home

With the word architect in their job title, it stands to reason that a landscape architect is the expert you need to ensure that any landscape design can match and compliment the architecture of your home or the building that it is going to be adjacent to.

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Tips To Make Landscaping Easier For Seniors

Date May 7, 2021 Category Gardens & Landscaping

For many, especially those who do not know much about landscaping, their concept of it conjures up images of little old men and women in their twilight years pottering about in their gardens. This belies the fact that landscaping gardening is a profession and a pastime enjoyed by many whose ages make them more likely to be grandchildren than a grandparent.

Nevertheless, it is also true that there are many people who might be regarded as in senior years who love landscaping, and who derive a huge amount of pleasure from designing, creating, and maintaining both natural, and man-made elements, within their landscape garden.

There are also many seniors, for whom their garden is simply a place where they can sit and relax, chat with friends and family, and make the most of the well-deserved free time they have, now that they have retired. They might also still enjoy some light gardening but here is where the sands of time can cause problems.

There is no escaping the fact that when we reach a certain age, our bodies are no longer as youthful, supple, and energetic as they were in our prime. For this reason, many seniors, regardless of how much they love gardening, struggle to enjoy it as much as they once did.

In addition, designing a landscape garden for a senior, given some of the issues we have just touched on, needs more consideration, than if it were being designed for those who are much younger. Whichever elements are being considered for the design, they need to take account of the senior’s mobility, physicality and potentially, their failing eyesight.

So, if you are helping seniors to design their ideal garden, be that your parents, your grandparents, a friend, or a client, then here are some ideas in terms of what you need to consider to make it a safe and enjoyable environment for them.

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5 Alternative Features You Can Create Using Millboard Decking

Date March 23, 2021 Category Gardens & Landscaping, Renovating

By it its very name, it would suggest that what you use millboard decking for is …to create decking. It will not shock you to learn that is exactly what the vast majority of people use millboard decking for, albeit there will be a multitude of different ways that is done, and different types of property it is used on.

Some will be small decks that maybe only cover a dozen or so square feet for an outdoor patio area, or they could be massive installations on multiple levels in a large garden. Beyond domestic settings, millboard decking is also used in business and municipal properties to create practical, but visually appealing walkways and features within outdoor spaces.

So, we have multiple decking possibilities in lots of different settings, but it is also important to know that millboard decking can be used for more than simply creating decks. There are a number of other structures, features, and projects it can be used for and so let us briefly outline some of them.

Sidings With a Difference

Regardless of the material that is currently on the outside of the walls of your home, or any other structures around your property, you can transform it by using millboard decking as siding. This can be done in a small way such as on one garden wall or as part of a comprehensive refacing of your home.

The benefits that millboard decking provides in terms of durability, stability, and longevity mean it can be an attractive and long-term solution for revamping the exterior of your property.

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Your Mindset When Creating A Landscaping Design

Date November 29, 2020 Category Gardens & Landscaping

It is our belief that landscaping is not something that necessarily always follows logic. Whilst you want your landscaping to be practical to some extent, the actual design of it should not always be created following some kind of set in stone criteria. Instead, some of the best landscaping designs ever created came from someone’s imagination, and they were all the better for it.

Of course, there are going to be some limitations simply because you are bound to the limits of the area you are working with, and practicalities to consider in terms of physically building the landscape, but beyond that, it is your creative mind that should be used to produce the design, not some gardening equivalent of a knitting pattern.

A lot of what we mean relates to your mindset when it comes to designing your landscaping. If you want to do it ‘by the book’, then the risk is that you will have a design that does not inspire and is nothing more than a replication of someone else’s design, with the occasional tweak here and there.

We hope to spark your mindset into a place where your landscaping design works practically but is also allowed to develop so that the final result is something which you’ll enjoy for many years.

What Is Your ‘Why’?

If you are going to spend time, and money in designing and creating a landscape, you must have a reason to do so. For whose benefit is it for? You? Your family? Friends?

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