When you own a home, your front yard has a huge impact on your home’s curb appeal. A lush, green lawn and picturesque landscape can increase your property value by as much as 25 percent, while an ill-maintained one can decrease it even more.
An appealing front yard landscape design, can significantly boost your Bergen County home’s curb appeal and property value.
Landscaping is the first thing that guests, neighbors and potential buyers see. It reflects well, or poorly, on other homes in the neighborhood, especially on the ones in the immediate vicinity.
If your home has an ugly, ill-maintained landscape, it can actually lower your next door neighbor’s curb appeal and property value. That’s why homeowners associations have exacting rules for landscaping.
Take a look at some simple, effective ways to add instant curb appeal to your home.
Create an Inviting Entrance
Your front yard landscape should create an inviting entrance to your home. It’s the first thing that your family and your guests see upon arrival. When you pull into your driveway, you want to be welcomed home by a beautiful front yard filled with greenery and color.
Your front yard serves as a first impression of your home and what’s inside, so it’s important to create a front yard landscape design that makes a strong statement.
Walkways
By installing a beautiful stone walkway that leads to your front door, you will instantly boost your home’s curb appeal and property value. A natural stone walkway will add texture and color and provide a safe foot path to your home.
Stones are available in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, textures and colors that will complement your home’s style. Walkways can be customized to fit any size front yard and any desired walkway shape.
Border Plants
Creating a beautiful border along your driveway, front walkway or front porch will add instant visual appeal. Whether you prefer lush greenery or brilliant color, you can find a wide variety of hardy border plants that will thrive in Bergen County landscapes.
Border plants will accentuate and define hardscapes, soften harsh edges and counter large-scale shrubs and plants in the front yard.
Water Features
The soothing sounds of running water instantly provide an atmosphere of comfort and calmness. To add visual interest and welcoming ambiance, consider a fountain, rock waterfall or running stream for your front yard landscape design.
If your home is traditional, a tiered fountain will enhance traditional style. If your home is contemporary or modern, a rock or stone waterfall or running stream will complement modern features.
Landscape Lighting
Landscape lighting is a simple, inexpensive way to create an inviting entrance and beautiful front yard. Pathway lighting installed along your driveway and front walkway will accentuate hardscape materials and border plants and provide safety to walking areas.
Uplights, downlights and spots can highlight landscape areas and garden beds. Landscape lighting comes in a wide variety of low-voltage, halogen, LED and solar fixtures.
Plant Trees
Trees give your front yard structure and form the backbone of the landscape, yet we often overlook their importance. Trees not only add curb appeal and value to your home (up to 28 percent), but they also prevent pollutants and provide home energy savings.
By adding even one tree to your front yard landscape design, you can:
- Increase curb appeal and property value
- Reduce harmful carbon dioxide (C02) in the atmosphere
- Prevent pollutants that enter the ground and water supplies
- Increase home energy savings by providing shade and windbreaks
According to landscape experts, planing trees on your property offers numerous benefits. Depending on the type, size, location and health of the trees on your property, you can significantly increase your home’s investment.
Mature trees that are healthy and native to the area can significantly increase curb appeal and property value in a neighborhood. For example, a 24-inch red maple, the country’s most popular tree can be worth up to $500, while a healthy, 15-inch silver maple can be worth as much as $2,800 in Bergen County landscapes.
Trees planted on your property can even add curb appeal and value to your neighbor’s property by increasing shade and energy savings.
Landscape studies show that trees with a large canopy growing within 100 feet of adjacent homes can add as much as $10,000 to an adjacent property’s sale price.
When planting trees in your front yard, the type and size of the tree is important. The placement of trees takes a lot more visualization and planning than the placement of smaller shrubs, plants and flowers because trees can grow quite large over time. You must have an idea of what they will look like in five, ten or twenty years.
For a front yard landscape design that works best for your home, consult a professional Bergen County landscape company, like Borst Landscape & Design, who can help you choose proper tree varieties and planting locations, so your trees will have room to grow.
Layer Your Landscape
A beautifully layered landscape will add instant curb appeal with year-round texture and color. By planting a variety of shrubs and plants, you can create an interesting layer of plant sizes, shapes, colors and blooms throughout your front yard. By planting blooming shrubs and plants that bloom at different times of the year, you can fill your front yard with wonderful color year-round.
Choose a Variety of Plants
When choosing landscape plants, resist the temptation to carpet-bomb your yard with your favorite shrub or plant, unless you want to end up with a boring, monochromatic landscape. Choosing a variety of plants will create more visual interest by providing a variety of sizes, shapes, textures and colors. Your front yard landscape will look best if you mix things up and strive for a variety of textures and four-season color.
- Shrubs – Combine spring-blooming azaleas with summer-blooming roses and autumn-blazing shrubs like burning bushes. For winter color, try the red osier dogwood, a hardy shrub that sports bright-red branches in winter.
- Ornamental Grasses – Ornamental grasses will provide exotic textures and year-round green foliage. Mondo grass, golden pheasant’s tail, cattails and baby bamboo will provide fall and winter greenery when many colorful annuals and perennials die back.
- Perennials and Annuals – Choose a variety of perennials and annuals that bloom at different times of the year. To narrow your choices, talk to a Bergen County landscape professional who can help with plant choices and proper planting times for your front yard landscape design.
- Groundcovers – Groundcovers provide low-level textures and colors and come in both sun and shade-loving varieties. Brass buttons, sweet fern, phlox, creeping thyme and hens-and-chicks will thrive in Bergen County planting areas.
Plant in Clusters
When creating your front yard landscape design with shrubs and plants, planting in clusters provides more visual interest than installing single soldier-like plants throughout your yard.
When planting, make sure that individual plants have plenty of room to spread, or they will look choked and crowded as they grow. If you over-crowd your planting groups, plants will compete with each other for food and water, putting the clusters at risk, especially during hot summer months.
When choosing plants, consider the USDA Hardiness Zone for Bergen County (Zone 6). Choosing plants that grow well in your hardiness zone will give them every opportunity to thrive in local climate and weather conditions.
When planting, consider the spacing suggestions on planting labels to give plants room to grow. When first planted, young plants may look sparse, but within a few years your cluster areas will be completely filled in.
Create Special Interest Areas
Whether you have a large, sprawling front yard or a small patch of grass, creating special interest areas is a quick way to boost curb appeal.
With the help of Borst Garden Design Services, you can create lovely garden beds with blooming annuals and perennials, seasonal displays and even holiday landscape designs.
Garden Design Services
- Annual and perennial garden design
- Bulb plantings
- Garden renovations
- Container planting
- Window-box planting
- Seasonal plantings and displays
- Holiday decorating and lighting
Garden Maintenance Services
- Annual and perennial maintenance
- Spring garden cleanup and Fall cut-back
- Weeding and cultivating of garden beds
- Fertilizing annuals and perennials
- Pruning and deadheading of annuals and perennials
- Custom pruning
- Disease and insect control
With specialty garden areas, you can accentuate your home’s style, architectural materials and colors and draw attention to custom and interesting features.
- Blooming Garden Beds – If you love colorful flowers, include special garden beds with lovely annuals, perennials and bulbs in your front yard landscape design. An array of brilliant, interesting blooms will instantly add curb appeal to your home. Garden designers can choose plant varieties that bloom in different seasons to fill your front yard with gorgeous color year-round.
- Specialty Gardens – For eye-catching appeal and wonderful scents, consider planting a specialty garden in your front yard. Butterfly gardens will attract beautiful butterflies, while scented gardens will provide year-round aromas. You can plant cutting gardens for year-round fresh flowers, herb gardens for cooking, wild life gardens for bird watching or native plant gardens for water conservation.
- Window Boxes – If you have a small front yard with limited planting space, consider adding window boxes to your home’s exterior. Window boxes filled with greenery or colorful blooms will add visual interest that increases curb appeal. If your home is painted a neutral beige or gray color, imagine window boxes filled with yellow mums, orange marigolds, red geraniums or purple hyacinth.
Provide Year-Round Maintenance
No matter what type of trees, shrubs, plants and flowers make up your front yard landscape design, curb appeal will be lost without regular landscape care and maintenance year-round.
Regular care and maintenance by a landscape professional will keep your landscape well-maintained, green and healthy.
When you hire a Bergen County landscape company, trained landscape crews will take care of your lawn and landscape once a week. Landscape services include:
- Lawn mowing every week
- Regular weeding
- Border edging for driveways and walkways
- Cleaning of all hardscaped surfaces
- Spring yard cleanup to remove dead winter growth and debris
- Fall yard cleanup to remove dead summer growth and prepare for winter
In addition to weekly landscape services, enhancement crews can provide additional services including:
- Lawn renovations
- Planting of flowers and small plants
- Shrub and tree pruning
- Mulching
- Fertilizing
- Garden design
- Organic lawn care
- Outdoor pest control
Landscape Maintenance Program
To ensure that your front yard landscape design stays green and healthy throughout the year, consider a landscape maintenance program for your home.
With a landscape maintenance program, experienced landscape crews will perform property inspections to look for problems like plant diseases, harmful insects and outdoor pests that can cause significant damages to your lawn, plants, shrubs and trees.
If any problems are found, crews will discuss concerns with you and provide solutions that will correct or eliminate the problems.
A landscape maintenance program uses natural, organic solutions to keep your landscape green and healthy year-round without any harsh chemicals. It promotes a safe, chemical-free landscape for your family and pets, so you don’t have to worry about harmful or toxic chemicals, plant diseases and outdoor pests in your Bergen County front yard.