Blog

The first thing people notice when visiting your home is the landscape and exterior. You want this area of your home to look it’s very best. For most homes, the way to enter the dwelling is via a walkway. There are ways to enhance a standard walkway, adding more value as well as visual interest to the home. By simply reviewing the landscape design tips below, you can find ways to change the look of your walkway with ease.

Add Some Lighting

A simple way to enhance the walkway towards the entrance of your home is with lighting. From solar lighting to electrical options, there are ways you can add light to enhance the walkway during the evening hours. Lighting can create a new look visually as well as have the added benefit of helping you walk into the home at night. Add pathway lighting for a streamlined look or a nice lamppost at the entrance for a unique look. There are many products available today to assist in adding lighting to walkways for a new look in the home.

Accentuate with Floral Color

Adding florals can easily create a new look for your walkway, by providing color. You can create a lining of flowers along the side of your walkway that creates visual interest and appeal. Choose to work with one color or type of flower or mix it up to create a unique look that can only be found at your home. You already have the base created with the walkway, so add in florals along the sides to bring in a bit of color to your landscaping.

Try Modified Wood Furniture

If you have a long walkway leading up to your home, how about adding in modified wood furniture along the way? Perhaps you have space where you can add in furniture so that you can enjoy a spot in your yard. Walkways that have winding paths can easily see furniture added within a curve or larger area of the path. Think about how you can add furniture near your walkway for added visual interest. A simple bench or chair seating can create a point of relaxation in your yard as well as help to bring together the overall design of your landscaping.

Consider Decorative Columns

One of the most important parts of any property is the landscaping. Making up a large part of a home’s curb appeal, landscaping also accounts for approximately 20% of a home’s value. Therefore, it’s important to make sure that your landscaping is well-maintained year-round to maximize your home’s potential.

Summer is the ideal time to do the bulk of your landscaping work, with the warmer temperatures and longer days meaning you can get more work done outdoors. Use these five tips to help make the most of your landscaping maintenance.

Prune

Late July is one of the most recommended times of year to do the pruning in your yard. Bushes, plants, and trees have a tendency to become overgrown, shaggy, and disheveled if lef...

I was asked to write this article by Illinois Homes

Check out my interview, Expert Tips on Landscape Design on Illinois Homes, one of the top sites for Illinois Real Estate, including Plainfield, IL real estate. Illinois Homes also services Wisconsin real estate and Pennsylvania real estate.

Line is defined as a mark that spans a distance between two points or the path of a moving point. It can take any form from end to end. A line is one-dimensional and can vary in width, direction, and length. Lines can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal, straight or curved, thick or thin. Lines lead your eye around the composition and can communicate information through their character and direction. Line can direct the eye to a desired focal point or it can define the edges of a form.

Point is the first and simplest element of visual design. Point serves as the focus of something visual, and therefore draws attention. Even if there is only one point, or one mark, on a blank page our brains will make it mean something. In fact, the visual world is so complex that the mind has developed strategies for coping with the confusion. The mind tries to find the simplest solution to a problem. One of the ways it does this is to form groups of items that have certain characteristics in common.

Our brain seeks some kind of relationship or order, even if only to use it as a point of orientation in relation to the outline of the page. If there are two points on a page, immediately the eye will make a connection and “see”...

In order to teach the process of design we need to have a common language, a vocabulary, that is unique to the world of design. The process of articulating design, as opposed to liking or disliking what you see, requires using this unique vocabulary. The vocabulary of design is broken down into a set of elements and principles. The elements are the structure of the design. The principles are how we organize the elements.

The elements of design are components or parts which can be isolated and defined in any visual design or work of art. They carry a wide variety of messages. The elements of design are a set of concepts used to articulate design; they are used to create paintings, sculptures, the everyday products that we use, and landscape designs. The elements of art are found in all works of art. Later I will show you how these elements are used in landscape design, but for now, let’s take a look at these elements one by one. The elements of design are:

Fundamentals of Design

Introduction: Design is a skill most of us already have available to us.

Whenever I teach design I find that the people in my class are inevitably fearful of putting pen to paper. By the time my students enter the classroom, whatever it was that had sparked them to sign up for a landscape design class, became eclipsed by a story in their heads that they don’t have any design skills. After having purchased this book, you may be feeling the same way. However, we all have innate design skills. It is my intent to show you that you do too.

Consider first that you have taste, a tendency to like certain things and not others. You already know what looks good and what doesn’t. In fact, you know this before even th...

This piece was a challenge to write. The red in the background reminded me of a building under construction so I did some research and came up with this story, based on a real story.

Shrouded in red canvas like a Chinese emperor several stories tall, the library was obscured from view. He had walked down 42nd street hundreds of times; marveled at the buildings iconic lions at its entrance. It was a gateway to Whitman’s manuscripts, the archives of Jack Kerouac, the Harlem Renaissance, and too many literary greats to comprehend. Three million books, like so many snowflakes, each unique unto itself, most will go unseen. To imagine that they would all be moved and buried somewhere in New Jersey confounded him. All this just to make way for coffee shops and computers didn’t make sense to him.

New York’s central library was closed for renovation. The plan was to move several million books out of the library to make way for more computer terminals and coffee shops. They say that’s what the public wants. He wondered what all those books must be thinking about the controversy over them. What would those books say about being sequestered? But they have already spoken, said what they had to say to the world. Now their words would be digitized, preserved and reduced to series of ones and zeros.

Although the library’s CEO, Tony Marx, claims that it will be possible to retrieve any volume from off-site storage within 24 hours, he wondered how accessible the books would really be. As a scholar, he knew that this library was unique. It was the only research library in the world where anyone could walk in—without any university credentials—and read any book, and when a public library takes its most prized holdings away from direct access, the affect on research is dimming.

Perhaps the red shrouds were a metaphor for the cloaking of thinking.

It had been years since he’d seen her. Would he even recognize her? The last time he saw her was at his sister’s wedding. He couldn’t believe she had the audacity to show up. She was at least amicable then. Nevertheless, after what she had done, it was difficult just being in her presence. They say time heals, but after all those years, it was still fresh in his mind. He remembered the call from the police in the middle of the night, the ensuing courtroom battles, and that verdict. How could a jury have found her innocent?

But this was a time for forgiveness. If he was going to be whole, he knew he had to forgive her. Forget about her reasons. No more blaming. The resentment has been too heavy a load to carry; he was det...