The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California
Basic Ways To Landscape Your Home
Penny Pinching
Penny pinching pays off when landscaping a home. Competent advice is often free and the best plant materials will prove cheapest in the long run.
EXPENSE IS USUALLY the greatest stumbling block for home owners starting to landscape their property. But planning, budgeting and doing your own work will give you the many distinctive couches which help to make your house a home. Good landscaping is a long-range project. Plan to complete your improvements over a period of several years; then they won't paralyze the family budget. Install ground cover and shade trees first, leaving the more decorative plants for the follow ing year. You can lay out hedges and filler plants, put in perennials and bulbs the third year, and winding up with special features such as pools or patios. Juggle the sequence of any plan to suit yourself (and the climate), extend or condense it to suit the needs of your property. Professional advice is also available, as many landscape architects offer an inexpensive consultation service. For a moderate fee they will prepare a plot plan, recommend suitable plants and advise you on propel maintenance and improvement.
Other ways to save money include buying smaller plants from nurseries ar low cost and growing them to the desired size, substituting a cluster of small flowering trees for a larger, more expensive tree, and buying sturdy and trouble-free plants requiring a minimum of maintenance. Vines are worth Considering, as they grow quickly, cost little and form a decorative screen. You may find that by checking local prices, the use of evergreen shrubs could be less expensive than deciduous trees. You may also find the shrubs more quickly adaptable to a difficult landscaping situation. You could grow perennials and annuals from seed or a friendly neighbor's division. Try starting a compost pile of waste plant materials. The compost makes an excellent fertilizer and weed-resistant root mulch. You could also write to the local plant experimental station for information on the planting services they offer to residents of your state.
When purchasing begins, you will soon discover that plant materials cost far less than expected. To give you an idea of landscaping costs we have included the following prices, subject to local price variations.
Small flowering trees (saucer magnolia, dogwood, flowering crab, Japanese cherry, hawthorn*, silvcrbell, photinia), to screen a window or break the long line of a fence, average $3-$10 for a five-foot whip. Evergreen shrubs (Japanese yew, junipers, laurel, ink-berry) cost from $5 to $25, depending on the variety purchased. Flowering shrubs (abclia, azaleas, hibiscus) range from $7.50 to $30.00 each. Seeds for annual filler plant! (zinnias, African marigolds, dahlias, salvia, tithonia, castor beans) retail for the usual $1.00 a packet. Two dollars worth of seed packets will do wonders for any yard.
