There’s no doubt that a beautiful lawn and well-tended flower beds add an emotional element of enjoyment to home ownership. But we know that landscape beauty takes maintenance. Many of us would rather spend our free time on other things during the weekend. It might make you feel you have no choice but to either spend the time or hire out the work to someone else. With some planning and ingenuity, you can actually create a lovely landscape that reduces the typical yard maintenance a home owner must spend to get that satisfying appeal.

Create interesting features with rocks. If mowing a ton of grass and tending to lots of flowers and weeds isn’t your thing, lay down plenty of rocks. They can be used as a dry creek bed, an ornamental patch of land mixed with perennials, or to create pathways. Lay them in a way that doesn’t allow grass to grow between them, for example, with larger stones interspersed with smaller pebbles among them. If your yard is small enough, you can even replace an entire small yard with stones. Besides the elegant variety they can bring to a yard, stones also help keep muddy run-off away and accompanying mosquitoes.

Replace soggy spots with a rain garden. If you have an area of lawn that gets puddles after a rain, consider transforming it into a rain garden. Think of it as a small wetland area that looks better than soggy grass. Rain gardens are fairly easy to create using a combination of gravel, sand, and native plants. Water collects and is soaked up more to nourish plant life, reducing the amount of water going into the sewer system. Not only will your rain garden have a practical use, it’s good for the environment. No mowing or major weeding required.

Add color with objects instead of flowers. Color is key to a gorgeous landscape. But your yard doesn’t have to include a multitude of flower varieties and their necessary care to achieve that effect. Add bright pots, fences, bird baths, Adirondack chairs, benches, and any other kind of yard art that sparks your interest. There’s no shortage of ideas on the HGTV network or on Pinterest. In addition to the color your objects bring, they’ll give personality to your outdoor space.

Plant tall grass. Grasses like bluestem, fountaingrass, muhly, and switchgrass grow fast and require little care. And you never need to mow them. They soak up water and their height provides an organic privacy partition. You can group them along a fence line, in geometric patterns, or randomly for a natural look. The most you’ll need to do is cut them back in late fall when they dry up.

Build a platform deck. Do you need an outdoor space in which you can spread out with friends and family or relax quietly? As long as you don’t have an incline or drop in your yard, create a platform deck without steps and railings. It’s simple, attractive, and functional. While decks do require some maintenance, the time involved doesn’t compare to weekly mowings. Dense hardwoods will last a long time with little maintenance.

Create pathways to reduce mowing areas. Whether you use stone, brick, gravel, dirt, mulch, or some combination, building pathways brings beauty and interest to a yard. Even the simplest of designs invite the eye. And of course, by taking up more space in your yard, you’ll have less grass to cut.

Platinum Service Realty