subject: Heightening The Sensual Experience Of A Well Designed Landscape [print this page] Landscaping is more than just a lawn and flowerbeds. Landscaping is a way to make a home or business stand out from the others that surround it in a positive way. Paving is one part of landscaping that is often overlooked, but a good paving job can continue to look great for many years and will provide cohesion to the other parts of the exterior of a home or business. Paving can be applied to a driveway, sidewalk or a patio. Patio landscaping provides some creative challenges for exterior design. A patio will often be set up somewhat like an outdoor room, sometimes with a cooking or grilling area, an eating area and a place to just sit outside. These different parts are often put against a background of plants and flowers to provide beauty and privacy to the homeowners who sit outside. In smaller yards or crowded subdivisions, there might not be very much exterior space to devote to a patio and the landscaping could suffer as a result. Bushes and trees can help create privacy screens if they are planned out well and designed for that purpose.
Larger yards are often able to support more landscaping options like swimming pools, reflecting pools and artificial river beds. A water feature can offer a sense of balance and beauty to a yard, even if it is just a waterfall wall in a small suburban yard. A winding, designed river relaxes the eyes and divides a yard into near and far spaces, giving an opportunity for another landscape feature, a bridge. The size of a created river depends on what the homeowners want and the size of the yard. In areas that are more desert, a riverbed can be used to incorporate some xeriscaping principles into the yard design while giving the homeowners a way to capture and direct what water might fall on their property into their lawn or other water dependent landscaping. In more moisture rich locations, a riverbed might be periodically wet or dry, depending on the season and even provide a way to fill up a small pond with fish or other wet loving creatures. A koi pond is popular with many homeowners because of the beauty and symbolism of these Asian fish. A pond that houses living creatures might need more planning and care than one that does not, but heightens the sensual experience of a well designed landscape.
