Popular Landscaping Ideas

Popular landscaping ideas can include anything from a private garden that can be quietly enjoyed from your new gazebo, to a cobblestone, arched bridge that leads over a loudly trickling waterfall. Landscaping projects can be as cheap as buying a few plants or as expensive as adding a new room to your home. Add one landscaping project at a time until you have a well-landscaped yard that reflects your personality and lifestyle.

Bring your landscaping to life by adding a bridge stylized to complement your landscape. Add a rustic wooden-plank bridge over a landscaped riverbed of dry stones. According to "New Complete Home Landscaping," stepping stones added to the pond that highlights a Japanese Zen garden should not touch each other in order to for them to successfully ward off evil spirits from crossing the water.

A straight concrete sidewalk from the road to the house can lessen the overall impact of the carefully landscaped lawn. Tear up the plain concrete walkway and replace it with popular walkway materials: flagstone, railroad ties or wood rounds. "Sunset Landscaping Illustrated" recommends adding extra-large plants or a trellis with clinging vines near the walkway to transform an existing landscape design that is just not coming together.

Hedges are popular landscape elements, but topiaries are real eye-openers. Unless you are artistically inclined yourself, you will need to hire a professional, but a professional topiary can make your landscaping design spring to nearly animated life. A topiary can result in hedge plants formed to look like simple geometric designs, but it is the animal topiaries that truly leave an impression. A professional designer can help you pick the right plants from which to create swans, rabbits or elephants.

Landscaping ideas don’t always mean creating new landscapes. You can add depth and interest to your current landscape design by adding or changing your lighting design. Dramatic effects can be achieved by placing a light below an ornamental tree or a statue. Underwater lights that illuminate a garden wall can create an otherworldly glow. "Design Ideas for Home Landscaping" recommends stringing fairy lights around tree trunks and on branches or decorating with overhead down lighting to create a moonbeam effect on your landscape at night.

Forced perspective is a popular landscaping idea in Japanese gardens where space is at a premium. If you have a very small area in which to landscape, you can create the illusion that it is larger than it really is. Place large trees, shrubs and boulders at the front of the landscaped area and smaller elements near the back. Features and accessories placed toward the front should be bold while finer textures are used for the background. Forced perspective is also accomplished, according to "All About Creating Japanese Gardens" by using detail in the foreground of your garden and avoiding detail toward the rear.