Cheap Landscaping Ideas
Great Design Options

Many homeowners are interested in cheap landscaping ideas or inexpensive landscaping.




You might be on a limited budget, yet still need or want to have a beautiful landscape design. This is very do-able. You just need to know how to use less expensive landscape options in the best way.

With a little creativity, you can save money in almost all areas of landscape design, such as the following:

Patios
Walkways
Driveways
Planting Designs
Retaining Walls
Fencing
Swimming Pools

Patios
An inexpensive patio can be made of concrete. This can be done very creatively and look lovely. I always feel that it is the entire landscape design is what becomes beautiful or not...not just the separate elements alone.

For example, let's say a homeowner spends a lot of money and installs a beautiful stone patio. But the surrounding plants are not healthy, or it is too small, or there is nothing lovely to look at in the garden. I would say this is not a success.

But let's take a similar situation where someone has a patio made of an inexpensive material. Yet there are lovely plantings with lots of color, a beautiful, small fountain nearby, and some comfortable chairs to sit on. Which would you rather have?

To take this another step, let's enhance the concrete a bit without adding much onto the cost. Let's make it a more interesting color rather than that typical "cement" color. Perhaps a beige or even a very soft peach color would look great. This is done by adding color into the concrete. (I much prefer this than adding the color on afterwards.) Now let's design an interesting pattern into the concrete...not a stamped concrete design, but just some interesting scored, squares of about 24" wide.

The patio can be rectilinear, but it can also have beautiful curves to it also.

And so you have it... a lovely patio at a fraction of the cost of one made of pavers, brick, bluestone, travertine or other natural stone.

To read more about cheap landscaping ideas regarding concrete patios, please visit:
Concrete Patio Designs
Concrete Patio Pictures

Walkways
Consider using loose stone or concrete to create a very nice but inexpensive walkway. Visit my page on concrete walkways to get some great ideas.

There are many types of loose stone that you can use for a walk. Pea gravel, small river stone, or even crushed stone are some nice options. It's advisable to edge the walkway when using this type of paving material so that the stones do not wander over to adjacent mulched or grassy areas. Steel edging is not too expensive. You can also create a border using brick or pavers raised up slightly above the walkway surface.

Driveways
Loose stone or tar and chip are great driveway options. Visit the following to learn more about tar and chip driveways, which is one of the better cheap landscaping ideas.
Tar and Chip Driveways
Tar and Chip Article

Planting Designs
The big questions...how to save money on plantings and still create a beautiful design? What are some specific cheap landscaping ideas?

There are certain plants that are frequently needed. For example, trees provide s sense of scale and break up the monotony of shrubs. Start with quality but smaller trees to save on costs.

Evergreen shrubs provide greenery in the winter and also bulk. Use some of the less expensive varieties and purchase smaller ones...but not that small that they will take forever to grow! If you are creating a foundation planting, 18 - 24" shrubs in the background will not be too small and grow to nice size in a fair amount of time.

Also...use lot of perennials!! These can be quite inexpensive and they grow quickly. The only downside is that most do not look great in the winter. Sometimes that is not important though.

Retaining Walls
Use concrete block for the material. If the wall faces an area that you do not see, you are all set. If the wall will be seen, use
lots of plants in front of the wall or at the top hanging over to soften and camouflage it.

Landscape Fencing
One of the least expensive types of fencing is black chain link.
Before you go "eeeeek!", consider the fact that it really does fade away in certain areas so that it is not very visible. An example of this is where it is placed in front of or in a wooded area. Similar to block retaining walls, if it is very focal, use plants to cover and soften it.

Swimming Pools
Vinyl liner swimming pools are much less expensive than conc
rete or gunite pools. Yet they can be designed so that one would hardly know that they are not a more expensive one. You can read more about this on my concrete and vinyl pools page.

To get an idea of the different costs of various paving materials, visit my page paving costs. Here you can learn about picing for both cheap landscaping ideas and the higher end materials also.

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