How to Prepare Trees and Landscaping for the Springtime

Guest Blogger #373, Entry #965, February 20, 2012

As winter is coming towards an end, more and more homeowners are starting to pay attention to their gardens.  Get a head start this year by tackling your landscaping and tree trimming goals today!  Planting flowers, shrubs, and plants may seem like an easy task.  After all, how hard can it be to take a plant out of the pot and find an open area to plant it in?  For landscaping beginners, much of landscaping is the preparation and the planning.  Without a good plan, it is hard to achieve the garden of your dreams.  Here’s some quick pointers for you beginners:

Get your trees and landscaping ready for spring!

Image via: Houzz

1. Start with an Image Board:

To give you a better idea of how you would like your final product to look like, gather some inspiration from the internet or from gardening magazines.  Take note of flowers or plants that you see on your daily morning drive.  Envision how these flowers and plants will look like in your yard.

2. Create a Mapped Plan:

Once you have a general gist of how you would like your garden to look, you are ready to move onto actually planning.  Things to ask yourself and consider: how big is your yard, how much money are you willing to spend, do you want your garden to be plant heavy or garden heavy.  You may not know what kind of plants you plan on getting, but you should have a general idea of what type of plants go where.

Create a plan of what your ideas look like

Image via: Sunset

3. Pick out Your Plants:

Now comes the best part of gardening: picking out the plants!  A few tips and pointers to keep in mind: color, growth cycle, how well the plants work together, and basic care instructions.  For landscaping, you want to pick out plants that work with each other.  There should be some uniformity when picking out plants.  After all it would be silly to plant a cactus in the middle of a bed of daisies.

4. Layer Plants:

Layering plants is an important, yet often overlooked technique in landscaping.  The general idea of layering is to have shorter plants in the front and taller plants in the back.  Just like taking group photos, you want the shortest people in the front and the tallest in the back, so you can clearly see everyone.  This should be taken into consideration when you are purchasing your plants.  It is always good to have a variety of plants.

Layer plants for visual interest

Image via: Providence Ltd Design

5. Maintain it Year Round:

One of the biggest misconceptions when it comes to creating your own garden and landscaping is letting your plants roam free after a landscape project.  Your garden will not tend itself and your plants probably won’t grow the way you want them to grow.  Just because you are done with landscaping, doesn’t mean you are done tending and maintaining your plants.  Having a great yard and garden takes constant work, but it’s well worth it!

Emilie is a writer living in Cincinnati.  In her free time she enjoys blogging about nature.  She maintains a blog with topics related to Cincinnati tree removal.  Hopefully you found this article helpful and get started on your landscaping plans today!

For more outdoor ideas on Stagetecture, click here.