Evaluate the Location

• Each part of your yard offers a different environment for a plant. This includes varying amounts of sun or shade as well as different levels of soil drainage. The success of your landscaping plan involves evaluating the best options for each location. There's no point in planting shade-tolerant plants in the sun. Instead, base your plan on choosing the hardiest plants for each location. This cuts down on maintenance, water usage and replacement costs.
  
  

Maintenance Requirements

• If you don't want to weed your garden, trim or prune bushes, then don't buy those varieties of plants. An optimal way to control landscape maintenance involves choosing low-maintenance, slow-growing plants that can literally be ignored. Xeriscaping uses this premise to create a simplistic garden featuring extremely low-maintenance, drought-tolerant plants. When designed properly, xeriscapes offer just as much pleasure to a gardener as a garden full of high-maintenance flowers.
  If you don't mind some maintenance, choose shrubs and plants that need moderate attention and grooming. You might need to clip back tall grasses before winter or prune roses. This seasonal work amounts to a small period of time where you'll need to lovingly care for your plants and your investment.
  
  

Trees

• Trees add a sense of peace to the outside of a home, flattering it with graceful branches and bright green leaves. It's quite tempting to stick a tree front and center but wait for just a moment. Trees invariably drop leaves in the fall, creating a mess on the lawn that gets tracked into the house. Maples throw out seed pods once a year, creating an even bigger mess. Consider the placement of your trees as the centerpieces for your landscape. Creating a pattern of plantings around these focal points will provide a sense of unity to your entire landscaping plan.
  
  

Designing a Plan

• Graph paper is a must with creating a landscaping plan. It's very important to get adequate measurements for your landscape and apply these to scale on the graph paper. Include your front walk and driveway in the correct dimensions. Consider the principal that everything points to the front entry of your home. Plants of various heights, borders, trees and shrubs should all lead a visitor from the driveway to the front door. Do your research at the local garden center. No one knows plant tolerances better than the local nursery. The store can give you recommendations for all kinds of plantings as well as maintenance tips.
  Consider irregular-shaped beds instead of straight lines, unless you prefer organization or it suits the architecture of your home. Irregularly shaped gardens flatter the front of the home and provide a natural transition to a front lawn. If you like more division between the grass and lawn, use landscaping bricks or another border material. Choose a few colors and repeat them throughout the landscape to create unity.
  Map out the major beds on your landscape plan. Making the plans to scale helps you to choose the correct number of plants for each space. Plants will be one of the largest expenses for your landscape, so visualizing your concepts using the landscape plan will help limit spending. Don't forget to leave adequate space to allow for plant growth over time.