Maintaining Trees and Lawns

Landscape Elements to Beautify Your Garden

by Cherly Wheeler

If you're planning an outdoor landscape project to enhance your yard, you could turn to materials such as natural stone and decorative concrete. Here are several ideas.

Natural Stone Pavers

Natural stone pavers are created when organic rock chunks are carved into shapes and sizes, perfect for you to incorporate into the garden. You could create a patio or pathway or line garden beds with the gorgeous colours and textures of rock pavers. Choose between species such as granite, slate or travertine, each offering diverse but characteristic colour fluctuations. For example, granite comes in charcoal, gold, and red tones. Slate combines blue, brown, yellow, and cream. Travertine spreads lighter shades such as ivory, peach, and pink around the landscape.

When choosing the colours for your garden, note the hue of the external walls of your house, other hardscape elements, and the natural foliage. If your home is red brick, you might consider warm red and peach tones. Alternatively, create a flattering contrast by laying dark charcoal paving, depending on the roof colour. If the patio or paths are surrounded by dark green leaves and vegetation, you could arrange pale cream, pink, and grey paving to emphasise the green.

Concrete Pavers

An alternative way to enhance a yard is to turn to concrete, which can be moulded into pavers. Concrete can be coloured and textured with pigments and moulds to create different looks, including mimicking natural stone. The advantage of concrete pavers is that they're typically more economical.

Pavers come in a variety of shapes, such as square, rectangle, and fan-shaped. Thus, you can piece them together to create decorative patterns such as basketweave, herringbone, and ashlar designs.

Gravel and River Pebbles

Rather than choosing manicured stone in the form of pavers in your landscape supplies, you might prefer rock in the more rustic form of river pebbles or crushed stone pulverised by a machine. While crushed rock is left with angular and jagged edges, river pebbles are smoothly rounded by running water. You can use either to create gravel paths or a driveway, mixing harmonious or contrasting colours. You'll have a choice of reds, yellows, greys, blues, and other hues. Angular crushed rock tends to settle in place when you walk on it, whereas rounded pebbles can shift more underfoot as they don't lock together in the same way.

Gravel pathways create a classic look, which can be either formal or rustic. For example, you could edge the sides of straight or circular gravel paths in a traditional geometric garden. Otherwise, let the stones peter out at the sides to create the look of an unmanicured natural bushwalk. Call a landscape supply company to order the pavers you need.

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