Landscaping is often considered as an investment of time, energy and money. Now I will show you how it also adds value to your home.

There are families that include attractive landscaping to their homes for personal pleasure. While there are others who wish to make long-term plans with home beautification so that they can demand an attractive sum from prospective buyers the day they wish to sell their homes. Adding value to your home comes at a small price of planning and maintaining a good landscape. Experts suggest that a well maintained landscape in the front as well as backyard helps you bargain for a straight 15% hike on the price you could have demanded otherwise. Also well landscaped homes sell 5 times faster than any other home. My article will presently help you understand some valuable landscaping ideas to make your home a bestseller.

Adding Greens to Your Yard

Planning The Layout
Landscaping needs a lot of imagination. You cannot go out there and plant just about any kind of plant and shrub at random. Ideally, you can take help of an expert friend or neighbor in this matter. If you wish to add some professional touch then you can definitely take some advice from an accomplished landscape architect. If however, you are blessed with some great landscaping ideas, then you need to sit down and make a rough plan on a piece of paper.

Setting Borders and Garden Beds
It is essential to set up your garden beds and borders well before you actually plant the shrubs and saplings. Use some old bricks or rounded stones from your garden to make garden borders. If your home happens to be closer to the beach, then using large-sized conches and shells as borders for garden beds is a really cool idea. You can use some stones for making artificial waterfalls in your garden too. Adding some gravel to garden paths makes walks in the garden pleasant. One of the most popular selling points of an attractively landscaped home is garden lights. Adding a good white washed fence around the garden is a popular idea too.

Buying Shrubs and Trees
The next step is to buy some good saplings and trees from some local nurseries. I am stressing on local nurseries because buyers and visitors always seem to give importance to regional plantation. After all, who would want desert plants like cacti for homes set in evergreen regions. Be ready to shell a significant sum of dollars as buying fully grown trees and rare seasonal plants can be really costly. However, be assured that this expense will gain you more than double in return. If however, you wish to cut down on costs, then go in for smaller plants. In due course, they will rapidly grow into giant trees. Personally, I suggest that you make gardens by including plants that bloom in specific seasons like just in summers or just in winters. Along with them, make sure to add some all season bloomers and fragrant varieties like roses. Buy some evergreen and thorny bushes that grow rapidly too.

Setting Up The Landscape
Set up your front yard in such a way that it is a visual delight to you as well as prospective buyers. Make sure that your garden looks smartest on the street. Set up the garden in such a way that the tallest plants and trees are standing in the rear and the shorter ones towards the center. With flowering shrubs, use your imagination and set them in such a way that every nook and corner of the garden looks colorful all round the year. It is a bad idea to have only a tiny corner of your garden blooming in winters and that too in single colored blossoms.

Maintaining the Landscape
It is not enough to just set up the garden and leave it to its fate. Buyers will easily make out that you have taken effort in growing and caring for your garden. Keep the garden clean and weed free all the time. Set up a garden drip or sprinkler system to water the plants routinely. You are naturally expected to mow the lawn regularly too. Make your garden attractive by choosing shapes for your garden trees. Trees can either be cut in conical or round shapes. Cutting trees not only makes your garden look uniform throughout but also boosts their growth.

Adding Garden Furniture
A time-tested way of attracting greater value to your home landscape is adding some pieces of furniture for everybody's delight. They make for a good seating place for guests when you hold garden parties. At the same time, they help make a fun place for kids to play in the garden. For your backyard, you can go with a good barbecue table and a wooden dining table. The front yard can definitely do with a good swing set or a tire swing on a tall tree to get that rustic feel. If your front yard has a rock garden theme, then make some stone furniture in a shady corner of the garden in the Flintstones way!

Some Added Selling Points

• Go in for some tall evergreen trees to border your entire garden. These not only help to block the view of your home from a neighbor's window, but also keeps dust and strong winds at bay. Trees like maple are known to create a natural air conditioning effect to your home. You will get huge brownie points for that.
• Use some dense landscaping bushes to hide the less attractive areas of your home like the meter box!
• You can plant some thorny bushes below your windows. These will keep burglars or a sneaking cat away from entering your home through your windows.
• Dedicate a small garden patch near your kitchen door or in your backyard for a vegetable patch. There is nothing more interesting than eating home-grown vegetables and herbs.

I am sure you have caught up with the whole concept of landscaping by now. Though it is a value adding point from the seller's point of you, I would advise all of you to take up landscaping for personal and family delight first.