Garden Landscape Plants

Grasses

• Your garden should ideally be seamlessly integrated into the surrounding landscape. Formal garden areas and a lush lawn can be given a clean and crisp division that is visually appealing by being separated with edging materials. An alternative option to traditional grass lawns is ground cover, which is a term covering a large variety of more ornamental grasses that don't require the same constant maintenance as turf grass. Going with the ground cover option also allows you to choose a type with characteristics that provide advantages to your specific landscape conditions.

Trees

• Trees can be an effective addition to a garden landscape when used sparsely for variation in height and texture, when planted as a grove or when used as a background for other garden plants. The most natural effect can be accomplished by planting multiple trees close enough to each other so that they are clearly a group, but far enough away to keep branches from intertwining or producing too much shade to allow some of them to mature.

Perennials

• Perennials are plants that can add diversity to your garden in terms of color, texture, size and shape. The term perennial refers to a plant that grows year after year before becoming dormant over winter. Some perennials can be used as ground cover. Other ways to use these plants in your garden landscape plans is within a garden bed, as decorative edging around water features and as an element in a mixed border.

Annuals

• Annuals differ from perennials in that they are plants that grow, flower, produce seeds and die all in the same growing season. The bright colors of many annual flowers make them a good choice for adding contrast when planted around trees, when used as accents among shrubs or just grown in a simple garden to be raised for cutting as bouquets to be used indoors.

Ferns

• When your garden landscaping must deal with areas of the yard left in the shade for extended periods of time, ferns can come in very handy. Another specific use for ferns is to deal with a corner section of the yard that you are having trouble growing plants in. If your garden is exposed to the full sun, you can add ferns to produce shadowy effects on the ground, inside a water feature or on rocks.