16 Garden Design Hacks That Make Your Yard Look Less Appealing
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Whether you’re already a seasoned gardener or a novice to green, setting up a welcoming outdoor space requires a bit of foresight. Many common missteps can inadvertently make your yard look cluttered, mismatched, or overdone.
Fortunately, with a few adjustments, you can avoid these design pitfalls, and your garden will be charming. So, let’s take a peek at some common gardening hacks that, when done wrong, make your yard look unappealing.
Overcrowding Plants
Too many species planted in a small space will make your garden look messy and chaotic. If plants are crowded, they will compete for light and nutrients and will often grow weak and lumpy. Usually, this overcrowding will achieve a jungle-like appearance without any clear focal point. A balanced planting scheme should be aimed to give a visually pleasing and harmonious space.
Excessive Lawn Ornaments
A few lawn ornaments can bring personality to a garden, but too many can turn it into a cluttered display. Gnomes, statues, and wind chimes can often detract from the natural beauty of the plants by overuse. Subtlety is the key to charm; in garden décor, less is often more. Pick a few statement pieces and use your plants as the stars.
Neglecting Dead Plants
Dead or dying plants in your garden make your garden appear unkempt and neglected. But brown, wilted foliage and droopy flowers can make an otherwise gorgeous area appear ‘forgotten’. Regular trimming or replacing these plants will help you keep the garden fresh. Such a quick maintenance effort goes a long way in overall appeal.
Ignoring Pathways
If your pathway to your garden is unclear, you’ll never know where you’re going. The visitor is guided through an organized flow, along pathways, and invited to explore. Plants and features get scattered, and disconnected without a path.
Inconsistent Color Schemes
Too many mismatched colors can overwhelm the senses and make a garden look disjointed. A good color palette can be a balanced scheme of either a vibrant mixture or a soft palette that gives a feeling of unity and calm. When colors clash, the natural beauty of the garden is distracted, and it’s harder to love that one plant. Instantly, a cohesive color scheme will make your yard appealing.
Ground Covers and Uncontrolled Vines
Lushness also comes from vines and ground covers, but they can quickly overtake a garden if they are not pruned. Uncontrolled vines can choke trees, shrubs, and even structures, adding a wild and neglected look to the garden. Don’t let ground covers go unchecked because they will invade pathways and other plants in the surrounding area.
Visible Garden Tools
Your garden will spoil the aesthetics if you leave tools, pots and gardening supplies out in the open. Laying down tools on fences, or spreading supplies all around will have the space feeling more like a work zone rather than a place of rest. A tidy garden always feels inviting.
Using Too Much Mulch
While mulch is good for plant health, too much is too good. Over mulching beds will make them look bulky and hide the natural beauty of your plants. It can also pile up a thick layer that can prevent water penetration and this can cause problems for the plant roots. The right balance is a tin, almost cinematic, layer that guards plants without stripping the appeal away from them.
Too Many Brightly Colored Pots
According to Ugaoo, brightly colored pots are great for adding vibrancy to your garden, but using too many in different shades can make your garden feel busy. When every plant is in a different-colored pot, the eyes have no focal point. This mishmash of colors can be overpowering to the plants themselves and turn into visual noise. Sticking to one or two hues creates a cohesive atmosphere.
Randomly Placed Potted Plants
Putting potted plants randomly in your garden may look silly. However, potted plants can enhance the beauty of your garden if laid out beautifully. Without pots, the visuals just don’t flow right, but if you have lots of scattering pots they break it up and make the space look cluttered. Rather, group potted plants together, or along pathways for that look of structure. This means each plant has a reason to exist, and you can decide where to put them.
Using Artificial Plants
Artificial plants are low maintenance, but they have a tacky look and don’t look real for a garden. They are real plants, you will not have the vibrancy or life of real plants, and often they fade over time, making your garden look dull. You’ll always get a fresher, more appealing atmosphere with fewer real plants versus artificial ones. In order of priority, real plants help retain the garden’s beauty and integrity.
Skipping Edging Around Beds
According to Peterboroughmastergardeners, Garden beds without edging look unfinished and spread messily into other areas. Clear edging adds a nice edge to defined boundaries and makes the space look neater and more orderly. If beds merge with the lawn or pathways, it breaks up the garden’s design and doesn’t seem as intentional. Stones or metal edging materials can also be added to give structure and polish to your garden.
Excessive Use of Gravel
Gravel pathways and ground cover are cute, but too much gravel makes them harsh and stark. Gravel can turn a garden into something of asphalt and concrete. When you use gravel in balance with something like grass or mulch, it softens the look. A little interest is added to the space without drowning it with tactful gravel placement.
Using Contrasting Textures Too Much
Matching contrasting textures—incorporating coarse grasses with delicate flowers, for example—can be pleasing (if it’s done to excess, not so much). Unity is broken if too many opposing textures are present in a garden. You want to pair textures in a balanced way so your design is cohesive. Your garden will look well thought out when you have the right blend.
Maintenance on Pathways
Clearing the pathways can take an hour or more, and over time, the pathways can become overgrown, cracked, or covered in weeds, and the garden can lose its appeal. Being forgotten and uninviting is something to be avoided by not maintaining the pathways. Maintaining pathways is fairly simple and helps keep them welcoming, for example, removing weeds and fixing cracks.
Using Too Much Symmetry
Symmetry is lovely, but too much of it can make a garden seem rigid and uninspired. A tad asymmetrical adds a touch of a more natural, more relaxed feel to gardens. A too-perfect layout may also seem artificial against the natural beauty of the plants. Softening up the symmetry with more irregular lines can make your yard seem friendlier.
Disclaimer: This list is solely the author’s opinion based on research and publicly available information.
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