You have no doubt got your home looking beautiful inside with delightful furnishings and decoration making it a pleasure to come back to and relax after a hard day in the office. Well, that is fine but what have you done in the garden to make it just as inviting?

If your garden does need some tender loving care to bring it up to the standard of the interior of your house, you may like to visit a few garden shows or garden centres where you will be sure to get many great ideas for your own garden. You will be able to talk to some of the exhibitors at the garden show, who will be happy to tell you how they designed their show gardens.

Using Garden Beds

You often find at shows that raised garden beds have been incorporated into the design to give the garden some height and depth. You can do exactly the same thing in your own garden.

What you need to do is to sit down in both your front garden and backyard with a sheet of paper and colouring pencils and prepare a garden plan of how you would like it to look. On that plan you can colour in the area that will be the place for your new lawn and where your garden beds will go. You will probably want to set aside an area in your backyard for a garden shed that you may wish to hide from view with some fast growing conifers.

By Freelk (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Adding Pathways or Fountain

You may wish to incorporate one or two paths. They may be continuous gravel paths or stepping-stones or a combination. The great thing is that you can do almost anything you like when it comes to garden design.

A water feature such as a garden pool, waterfall or fountain may appeal as it will attract insect life that you would not normally see and enable you to plant some water based plants such as water lilies. You could position some garden pots by the side of the pool with some colourful flowers and bulbs in them that will come out in the appropriate season. You could also create a delightful rockery feature around the pool. Plan this well and you could have year round colour in your garden.

You will no doubt wish to sit out in your newly created backyard, so why not pop down to the garden centre and buy a rustic wooden table and set of chairs that can be situated in the barbecue area that you have created to be enjoyed on summer evenings with family and friends.

When deciding on the features in your garden, you need to take into account the amount of time you will have available to maintain it. So, if you are out at work and don’t get home until very late because you have a long commute into the office you may wish to keep the maintenance low. This can be done by not having a lawn put down and instead using gravel and having colourful borders full of plants and flowers that will also provide greenery.

Here’s also a clip by Lowe’s about some gardening tips in small places using pots and garden beds.