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Ideas for Front Yard Landscaping Foundation Planting
Photo by Tobias Bjørkli from Pexels
Front Yard

Ideas for Front Yard Landscaping Foundation Planting

Testing a planting plan on paper before breaking ground or buying plants can save time, money, and aggravation. I recommend a simple, inexpensive technique for visualizing how a combination of foundation plants will look next to your house. All you need is a photograph of your house; plant pictures from magazines, catalogs, or books; removable tape or rubber cement; scissors; white paper; tracing paper; colored pencils or markers; and access to a photocopier.

First, photograph your house from a distance that includes the garden area you wish to develop. Enlarge the photograph to at least 8-1/2 by 14 inches. A black-and-white photocopied enlargement works well.

Next, locate pictures of plants you are considering for your landscape. Photocopy these pictures, trim around the edges of the plants, and paste them onto sheets of plain, white paper. Then make more photocopies, enlarging or reducing the pictures as needed until the plants are in scale with the photo of your house. A front door is about 6 feet tall, so you can use this figure for establishing scale. I like to make my plants the size they will be at maturity, so that I can see how much room to allow for them in my plan.

Next, position the photocopied plants on the enlargement of your house, using removable tape or rubber cement so you can reposition them as needed. To create a three-dimensional effect, make plants in the foreground slightly larger than those next to the house.

Finally, cover your layered photocopy with a sheet of tracing paper and trace the outline of your house with its new front-yard plantings, which you can color with pencils or markers if you wish.

Source: www.finegardening.com