Creative Backyard Landscaping Ideas To Make Your Neighbors Jealous

Want a backyard you can be proud to show off? With a little creativity, a backyard landscape can be a lot more than some grass and a swing set. Take a look at these uncommon backyard landscaping ideas to get some ideas for your own home.

Touch Garden
Landscaping doesn't have to be all about color. Plants with touchable textures add another element to the gardening experience and are especially good for curious young children and the visually impaired. Once you start looking, you'll be surprised at how many touchable plants there are. Some favorites are papery plants like money plant (Lunaria annua) and Statice (Limonium latifolium), plants with fuzzy leaves like woolly thyme (Thymus praecox), Horehound (Marrubium spp.) and Lamb's ear, and feathery plants like astilbe (Astilbe spp.) and dill (Anethum graveolens). Plant them next to walkways and seating areas to make them even more inviting.

Zen-Style Garden
If you're looking for very low-maintanence backyard landscaping idea, a Zen-style garden may be for you. Creating a true Zen garden would require an understanding of Zen philosophy, but you can easily reproduce the design of these meditation gardens. A Zen garden is a dry landscape garden in which the elements of nature are represented by a composition of sand or moss, gravel, stone and rock. Plants are limited to small evergreen trees, ground-level greenery, and a few modest flowers. Many Zen gardens also include raked gravel, but this is the only element that's designed to replicate nature.

Foliage Garden
Flowers aren't the only things that can bring color to your backyard. A foliage garden is a low-maintenance backyard landscaping idea that provides as much show as any flower garden. Plants with foliage in rich wine red, golden yellow, cool blue, and silvery gray can fill the landscape with color all year round. Look for plants that provide not only color, but interesting textures and shapes, too.

Vertical Garden
Want to squeeze a big garden into a small backyard? With a little organization, it can be done. Choose trailing, climbing, and container-friendly plants to create a space-saving vertical garden. Using baskets, window boxes, and pots filled with trailing plants is one of the easiest ways to do this. For a unique way to organize pots, try one of the upright plant-holder poles that use hooks to hold up to nine pots in a straight-up row with each pot angled differently to add interest. Raised beds and terraces are another vertical option. These make it easy to improve your soil in limited areas and, if sturdily build, provide seating, too. If you've got a garden wall, besides training climbing plants on it, you can attach hooks or brackets to hang baskets, plant small flowers in cracks between stones, or add a wall-mounted fountain or other decor.

Landscaping your front yard may take precedence, but don't neglect the backyard, either. If you're planning to landscape your backyard, take time to browse through as many different backyard landscaping ideas as you can to find designs that not only look good, but fit your personal needs, too.