9 Easy-to-Install New Home Landscapes that Look Great

If you’re starting from scratch on a new home landscape, lucky you! It can be daunting, but a few design principles and style ideas help guide the process.

If you’re embellishing an existing landscape (as gardeners often are), the same components apply. With easy-to-install home landscape ideas, we can boost curb appeal while creating spaces to enjoy nature and time spent outside.

Easy home landscapes revolve around our specific uses and aesthetics. They highlight low-maintenance, high-performing plants with multi-season appeal and ecological benefits. They bring in varying heights of trees, shrubs, and groundcovers for variety, as well as contrasting textures and forms for visual interest.

Consider your goals for the landscape, from growing food to wildflowers to a simple evergreen platform (or all of the above). Choose selections reliable in your growing zone and have fun experimenting as the garden evolves.

Create a Balanced Foundation

A working foundation unites the home with its surrounding environment. It blends specimen trees, shrubs, and perennials for layers of height and interest.

Foundation plantings can be full and abundant or clean and simple based on the connection between the home and the landscape. A balanced foundation is proportional, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical. 

A standout foundation relies on evergreen specimens as year-round anchors and flowering shrubs and perennials for extended seasons of color and visual interest. Yew, boxwoods, and juniper bring evergreen structure. Hydrangeas, old garden roses, and azaleas bring seasonal color with extended flowering. Perennials like phlox, allium, hosta, and ornamental grasses add color and movement. 

Repeat the palette and add a multibranched tree or two, like serviceberry, Japanese maple, fringetree, and redbud, depending on scale.

Add Multi-Season Appeal

It’s easy to install plants with multiple seasons of interest in the home landscape with the right selections. Through variations in flowers, dynamic foliage, texture, and seeds and fruits, there’s always something interesting going on in the garden.

An all-season landscape is not only attractive, it also supports pollinators, birds, and other wildlife throughout the year with forage and shelter. With a varied plant selection, our garden inhabitants can stay year-round or return to visit on their migrations, banking on food sources.

Deciduous trees with autumnal color and interesting branching bring form across the seasons (not to mention cooling shade in the summer). Conifers offer icy winter beauty and structure throughout the year with their form and branching. Ornamental grasses, with showy dried plumes, and perennials with persisting seedheads last well beyond their peak season.

Be sure to add winter-flowering selections to brighten the chilly landscape and even delight the garden with fragrance.

Incorporate Perennials

Perennials play a valuable role in foundation plantings and in the border. They’re the workhorses of easy visual appeal in the home landscape.

Reliable performers create a layered landscape full of movement, texture, and color year after year. They also provide essential support for pollinators, birds, and other wildlife with their nectar and pollen, forage, and shelter opportunities.

Native species and their cultivars are especially adaptable in their local growing environments, thriving with little maintenance or extra resources in their optimal conditions. Mix up the shrub foundation or enliven a bed with perennials suited to the site’s sun exposure, moisture levels, and soil type. Reduce the lawn with a colorful perennial border that buzzes with activity into fall.

Go Waterwise

Water is a key consideration for so many growing areas that it makes sense to adapt our landscapes to the available resources. Waterwise selections abound in Mediterranean and arid climates, where xeric plants grow without the need for much, if any, supplemental water. 

More temperate zones can incorporate xeriscaping themes with drought-resistant plants, native species for our growing areas, and their cultivars. Adapted to our local climates, natives are more resilient across seasonal extremes than plants that rely on frequent moisture to thrive. Natives and succulent perennials have the added advantage of being durable and low-maintenance, too.

Consider rock garden or rain garden plantings that perform in a variety of conditions. Use rocks, gravel, or other local, natural accents to embellish the look. Bringing in or working with existing natural features emphasizes the connection between the home and the surrounding environment (think endemic rocks, stone walls, or walkways).

Mix it Up With Containers

To create changeable, portable, dynamic appeal, containers are an easy addition to the home landscape. They allow us to expand our growing area, especially in small spaces or where growing space is limited. They bring eye-catching detail, whether using anchoring evergreens, seasonal annuals, or food crops. Planters are a simple enhancement that excites interest.

Use container combinations to create focal points and especially to accent the entry. They offer an instant boost in curb appeal. Hanging baskets and window boxes introduce a vertical element to expand the greenery and growing dimension.

Add Groundcovers

After trees, shrubs, and perennials, groundcovers bring a final layer to the landscape that adds fullness and dimension. They offer a low-maintenance alternative to turf and work well on challenging sites like slopes.

Whether starting with a blank slate or working on an existing landscape, consider larger specimens first and work your way down to the ground layer. Trees and large shrubs are the bones of the garden and impact the plants growing around them (altering light conditions and requiring room to grow). The groundcover layer of perennials and annuals brings a punch of seasonal color and interest.

Consider the role of turf at the ground level, and accent grassy areas with planting beds. A patch of lawn gives us a place to play and relax and a space for pets, too. It helps define the garden and gives a visual break among beds and walkways.

Too much turf, though, means more maintenance and a vast, uniform look. Mix it up by increasing easy plantings and groundcovers as they suit your style and landscape uses.

Plant an Evergreen Screen

An evergreen screen or mixed hedge is a natural way to increase privacy and disguise unappealing features like utility boxes. A planted buffer blends seamlessly into the surrounding landscape by using repeated plant material, tones, or textures.

Use planted screens to define spaces and sculpt the view. Consider the view from inside the house, too, when installing a buffer. Screens can be as easy as a perennial border, a single specimen tree or shrub, or a structural evergreen hedge. Rely on evergreens for year-round cover. Adding in flowering shrubs and perennials softens the look.

Use Mulch

Mulch and a clean bed edge go a long way to unify and tidy a landscape. Mulching helps define a bed while serving valuable roles of insulating and regulating soil temperatures, keeping them cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. It aids moisture retention, adds nutrition as it decomposes, and suppresses weeds.

Topdress with a layer of bark chips, pine straw, leaf mulch, or compost for a rich foundation. Keep it fresh with annual applications, or apply one round in fall and again in spring. Make your own leaf mold from autumn’s natural leaf drop to condition the soil. Use natural, dark materials to go unnoticed while providing a clean look with hidden benefits.

Punch Up Color with Easy Spring Bulbs

A sweep of daffodils, or a cluster of bulbs in pots, brings a burst of sunny color to usher in spring. With easy fall planting, spring-flowering bulbs rest until they emerge at winter’s end. In the right location, they need little tending to appreciate their seasonal rewards.